GIMPS: Root privilege escalation — GLSA 201709-11

Gentoo's GIMPS ebuilds are vulnerable to privilege escalation due to improper permissions. A local attacker could use it to gain root privileges.

Affected packages

Background

GIMPS, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, is a software capable of find Mersenne Primes, which are used in cryptography. GIMPS is also used for hardware testing.

Description

It was discovered that Gentoo’s default GIMPS installation suffered from a privilege escalation vulnerability in the init script. This script calls an unsafe “chown -R” command in checkconfig() function.

Impact

A local attacker who does not belong to the root group, but has the ability to modify the /var/lib/gimps directory can escalate privileges to the root group.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=sci-mathematics/gimps-28.10-r1"
 

References

• CVE-2017-14484

Release date
September 17, 2017

Latest revision
September 17, 2017: 1

Severity
high

Exploitable
local

Bugzilla entries

• 603408