Synopsis

Moderate: condor security, bug fix and enhancement update

Type/Severity

Security Advisory: Moderate

Topic

Updated condor packages that address multiple security issues, fix several
bugs, and introduce feature enhancements are now available for Red Hat
Enterprise MRG 1.0 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

This update has been rated as having moderate security impact by the Red
Hat Security Response Team.

Description

Condor is a specialized workload management system for compute-intensive
jobs. It provides a job queuing mechanism, scheduling policy, priority
scheme, and resource monitoring and management.

A flaw was found in the way Condor processed user submitted jobs. It was
possible for a user to submit a job in a way that could cause that job to
run as a different user with access to the pool. (CVE-2008-3826)

A stack based buffer overflow flaw was found in Condor's condor_schedd
daemon. A user who had permissions to submit a job could do so in a manner
that could cause condor_schedd to crash or, potentially, execute arbitrary
code with the permissions of condor_schedd. (CVE-2008-3828)

A denial-of-service flaw was found in Condor's condor_schedd daemon. A user
who had permissions to submit a job could do so in a manner that would
cause condor_schedd to crash. (CVE-2008-3829)

A flaw was found in the way Condor processes allowed and denied netmasks
for access control. If a configuration file contained an overlapping
netmask in the allow or deny rules, it could cause that rule to be ignored,
allowing unintended access. (CVE-2008-3830)

This update also fixes the following bugs:

• the "amazon_gahp -m" command sets the AMAZON_GAHP_WORKER_MAX_NUM
  configuration option, fixing the maximum number of processes contacting EC2
  at any given time. Previously, Condor did not honor this option, leaving
  the maximum number of created threads unbounded. This has been corrected:
  values set with the "-m" argument are now properly understood.
  
• the gridmanager constructed KeyPairs for all outstanding EC2 jobs before
  any jobs are started. When there were many (>10,000) EC2 jobs in the queue,
  significant delays occurred. With this update, KeyPairs are no longer
  constructed up-front.
  
• an error in condor_negotiator caused intialization code to re-run
  whenever condor_reconfig was run. The flag which noted if the
  initialization code should run was always set to "true". This error has
  been corrected: the initialization code now executes only at startup.
  

As well, this update adds the following enhancements:

• this release introduces Concurrency Limits. These allow Condor to account
  for resources not directly under its control, such as software licenses.
  
• this update includes the latest stable upstream release of Condor:
  version 7.0.5. Information on the features and fixes included with this
  release are in the Condor Release Notes, available via the link in the
  References section below.
  
• base support for low-latency scheduling and transparent translation of
  EC2 jobs has also been added in this update. Note: implementation of these
  two features depends on separate packages which are yet to be released.
  

All Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.0 users are advised to upgrade to these
updated packages which address these vulnerabilities, fix these bugs and
add these enhancements.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure that all previously-released
errata relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via Red Hat Network. Details on how to use
the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at
http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/FAQ_58_10188

Affected Products

• MRG Grid 1 x86_64
• MRG Grid 1 i386

Fixes

• BZ - 451069 - gSOAP amazon-gahp needs max to worker pool
• BZ - 451799 - upfront construction of ec2 KeyPairs is time consuming
• BZ - 462662 - SetAttribute does not check validity of attribute's name
• BZ - 463987 - CVE-2008-3826 condor: users can run jobs with arbitrary owners
• BZ - 463990 - CVE-2008-3828 condor: buffer overflow in lookup_macro
• BZ - 463995 - CVE-2008-3829 condor: denial of service attack on Schedd via corrupt logfile
• BZ - 463997 - CVE-2008-3830 condor: allow or deny with overlapping netmasks may be ignored

CVEs

• CVE-2008-3829
• CVE-2008-3828
• CVE-2008-3830
• CVE-2008-3826

References

• http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/#moderate
• http://cs.wisc.edu/condor/manual/v7.0/8_3Stable_Release.html

This erratum does not contain any packages.