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Re: Mathematica8.0.4 on Linux /tmp/MathLink vulnerability
From: Vikram Dhillon <dhillonv10 () gmail com>
Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:54:00 -0400
Hello, One quick fix here could be to change user permissions with chmod or add a new group where Mathematica in /tmp doesn't have permissions to anything under /home so then even if a user is compromised, the symlink won't work because the user doesn't have permissions. A root user here is an entirely different problem, here an attacker can symlink to any directory. So a new group to setup permissions for Mathemtica /tmp access would be a better idea. Will look into a patch soon. - Vikram On Sat, Apr 14, 2012 at 6:28 PM, <paul.szabo () sydney edu au> wrote:
The problem reported for Mathematica became worse at version 8.0.4, present for the command-line interface "math" also. Cheers, Paul Szabo psz () maths usyd edu au http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/psz/ School of Mathematics and Statistics University of Sydney Australia --- http://lists.grok.org.uk/pipermail/full-disclosure/2010-May/074548.html http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/511298 http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/40169 Paraphrasing what I wrote on 14 May 2010: "Mathematica is the world's ultimate application for computations..." http://www.wolfram.com/products/ Mathematica on Linux uses the /tmp/MathLink directory in insecure ways. Mathematica creates or re-uses an existing /tmp/MathLink directory, and overwrites files within and follows symlinks. This type of behaviour is "known unsafe" on multi-user machines e.g. University login servers. As a classic example of a symlink attack, if an "attacker" uses: mkdir /tmp/MathLink; ln -s /home/victim/.bashrc /tmp/MathLink/.shmsrec then when the victim runs Mathematica his ~/.bashrc will be clobbered. New files are created world-writable, allowing a complete compromise of the user account by linking to ~/.bash_logout . (If root ever uses Mathematica then the damage is greater.) There is no workaround: the command-line math interface is also unsafe. Notified support () wolfram com on 7 May 2010, was assigned [TS 16194].
-- Regards, Vikram Dhillon ~~~ To perceive is to suffer. _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/
Current thread:
- Mathematica8.0.4 on Linux /tmp/MathLink vulnerability paul . szabo (Apr 14)
- Re: Mathematica8.0.4 on Linux /tmp/MathLink vulnerability Vikram Dhillon (Apr 17)
- Re: Mathematica8.0.4 on Linux /tmp/MathLink vulnerability paul . szabo (Apr 16)
- Re: Mathematica8.0.4 on Linux /tmp/MathLink vulnerability Vikram Dhillon (Apr 17)