Security
Security
A vulnerability in PulseAudio may allow a local user to execute code with escalated privileges.
| Package | media-sound/pulseaudio on all architectures |
|---|---|
| Affected versions | < 0.9.9-r54 |
| Unaffected versions | >= 0.9.9-r54 |
PulseAudio is a network-enabled sound server with an advanced plug-in system.
Tavis Ormandy and Julien Tinnes of the Google Security Team discovered that the pulseaudio binary is installed setuid root, and does not drop privileges before re-executing itself. The vulnerability has independently been reported to oCERT by Yorick Koster.
A local user who has write access to any directory on the file system containing /usr/bin can exploit this vulnerability using a race condition to execute arbitrary code with root privileges.
Ensure that the file system holding /usr/bin does not contain directories that are writable for unprivileged users.
All PulseAudio users should upgrade to the latest version:
# emerge --sync # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=media-sound/pulseaudio-0.9.9-r54"
Release date
July 16, 2009
Latest revision
July 16, 2009: 01
Severity
high
Exploitable
local
Bugzilla entries