[USN-893-1] Samba vulnerability

By | 2010/01/28

The following security announcement applies to smbfs. If you have smbfs installed, please see below for details on the vulnerability and instructions on patching your system:

Ronald Volgers discovered that the mount.cifs utility, when installed as a
setuid program, suffered from a race condition when verifying user
permissions. A local attacker could trick samba into mounting over
arbitrary locations, leading to a root privilege escalation.

The above security vulnerabilities apply to the following Ubuntu releases:

  • Ubuntu 6.06 LTS
  • Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
  • Ubuntu 8.10
  • Ubuntu 9.04
  • Ubuntu 9.10

If you are have this utility installed on your Ubuntu system you’ll need to apply the security update to be protected. Please follow the steps below to ensure your system is properly patched:

Apply Updates

To apply the updates run the following command(s) within your Terminal:

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude safe-upgrade

In general, a standard system upgrade is sufficient to effect the necessary changes.