USN-2473-1: coreutils vulnerabilities

14 January 2015

date and touch could be made to crash or run programs if they handled specially crafted input.

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Details

It was discovered that the distcheck rule in dist-check.mk in GNU
coreutils allows local users to gain privileges via a symlink attack
on a directory tree under /tmp. This issue only affected Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
(CVE-2009-4135)

Bertrand Jacquin and Fiedler Roman discovered date and touch incorrectly
handled user-supplied input. An attacker could possibly use this to cause
a denial of service or potentially execute code. (CVE-2014-9471)

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Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 14.04
Ubuntu 12.04
Ubuntu 10.04

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.

References

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