CVE-2014-0039: fwsnort loaded configuration file from cwd when run as a non-root user

[Murray McAllister <mmcallis () redhat com>]

Good morning,

When fwsnort was run as a non-root user, it opened the fwsnort.conf file
from the current working directory if a configuration file was not
explicitly specified. The configuration file can specify a directory to
load libraries from, so this would have been an issue if running fwsnort
in an attacker-controlled directory.

Michael Rash has released fwsnort-1.6.4 to fix this issue:

http://www.cipherdyne.org/fwsnort/download/
https://github.com/mrash/fwsnort/blob/master/ChangeLog

The patch (with further issue details) for CVE-2014-0039 is:

https://github.com/mrash/fwsnort/commit/fa977453120cc48e1654f373311f9cac468d3348

For the affected versions, I had only tested 1.6.3 (on Fedora and EPEL).

Cheers,

--
Murray McAllister / Red Hat Security Response Team