Local Privilege Escalation via Symlink Attack Affecting puppet package, versions <2.6.11>=2.7.0, <2.7.5


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team. Learn more

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.04% (6th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-RUBY-PUPPET-20304
  • published28 Feb 2017
  • disclosed29 Sept 2011
  • creditRicky Zhou

Introduced: 29 Sep 2011

CVE-2011-3870  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-61  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade puppet to version 2.6.11, 2.7.5 or higher.

Overview

puppet is an automated configuration management tool. Affected versions of the package are vulnerable to Symlink Attack via a user's SSH authorized_keys field. A TOCTOU (time-of-check-to-time-of-use) race vulnerability was present in the ssh_authorized_key type. When the target file and directory did not exist, each of them would be created as root and later chowned to the user. This made it possible to replace either one with a symlink to an arbitrary file, which would then become owned by that user. This would allow local privilege escalation to root through standard TOCTOU attack techniques.

CVSS Scores

version 3.1