kdebase: KDM vulnerabilities — GLSA 200311-01

A bug in KDM can allow privilege escalation with certain configurations of PAM modules.

Affected packages

Package 	kde-base/kdebase on all architectures
Affected versions 	<= 3.1.3
Unaffected versions 	>= 3.1.4

Background

KDM is the desktop manager included with the K Desktop Environment.

Description

Firstly, versions of KDM <=3.1.3 are vulnerable to a privilege escalation bug with a specific configuration of PAM modules. Users who do not use PAM with KDM and users who use PAM with regular Unix crypt/MD5 based authentication methods are not affected.

Secondly, KDM uses a weak cookie generation algorithm. Users are advised to upgrade to KDE 3.1.4, which uses /dev/urandom as a non-predictable source of entropy to improve security.

Impact

A remote or local attacker could gain root privileges.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

It is recommended that all Gentoo Linux users who are running kde-base/kdebase <=3.1.3 upgrade:

 # emerge sync
 # emerge -pv '>=kde-base/kde-3.1.4'
 # emerge '>=kde-base/kde-3.1.4'
 # emerge clean

References

    CAN-2003-0690
    CAN-2003-0692
    KDE Security Advisory