Re: CVE Request -- logrotate -- nine issues

[Florian Zumbiehl <florz () florz de>]

Hi,

> The rest, as described, appear to rely on sysadmin error and to assume
> security properties that logrotate never advertised it had.  Specifically,
> logrotate was never declared to be safe to use on untrusted directories,
> and it was an error for a sysadmin to make such an assumption.
>
> I don't mind logrotate being enhanced/hardened in this respect, but to
> call these vulnerabilities sounds like a stretch.  Also, even if
> logrotate is hardened, it should not be declared to be safe to use on
> untrusted directories.  It'd be better to explicitly state that it is
> not, to avoid this sort of confusion.

In which scenarios exactly logrotate is supposed to be safe to use is
mostly undefined.

However, it is currently a common setup (as in: what distributions do out
of the box) to have a daily logrotate cron job run as root that rotates
the logs of all the services and to have log directories owned by service
users (so they can create missing log files, for example).

In such setups, the service user can elevate its privileges to root
or corrupt root-owned files using the various bugs.

Florian