PDFjam: Multiple vulnerabilities

Security Team Contact Address

Updated March 07, 2009

1. Gentoo Linux Security Advisory

Advisory Reference	GLSA 200903-05 / pdfjam
Release Date	March 07, 2009
Latest Revision	March 07, 2009: 01
Impact	normal
Exploitable	local

Package	Vulnerable versions	Unaffected versions	Architecture(s)
app-text/pdfjam	< 1.20-r1	>= 1.20-r1	All supported architectures

Related bugreports: #252734

Synopsis

Multiple vulnerabilities in the PDFjam scripts allow for local privilege escalation.

2. Impact Information

Background

PDFjam is a small collection of shell scripts to edit PDF documents, including pdfnup, pdfjoin and pdf90.

Description

Martin Vaeth reported multiple untrusted search path vulnerabilities (CVE-2008-5843).
Marcus Meissner of the SUSE Security Team reported that temporary files are created with a predictable name (CVE-2008-5743).

Impact

A local attacker could place a specially crafted Python module in the current working directory or the /var/tmp directory, and entice a user to run the PDFjam scripts, leading to the execution of arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running the application. A local attacker could also leverage symlink attacks to overwrite arbitrary files.

3. Resolution Information

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All PDFjam users should upgrade to the latest version:

Code Listing 3.1: Resolution

# emerge --sync
# emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=app-text/pdfjam-1.20-r1"

4. References