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Vigil@nce - KAuth: privilege escalation via UnixProcess
August 2014 by Vigil@nce
This bulletin was written by Vigil@nce : http://vigilance.fr/offer
SYNTHESIS OF THE VULNERABILITY
A local attacker can bypass the KAuth authentication, in order to
escalate his privileges.
Impacted products: Ubuntu, Unix (platform)
Severity: 2/4
Creation date: 21/07/2014
DESCRIPTION OF THE VULNERABILITY
The KAuth authentication service of KDE uses the PolicyKit
backend. The PolicyKit feature defines a security policy, so
unprivileged processes are allowed to communicate with privileged
processes.
However, PolicyKit uses UnixProcess to obtain the UID of the
process requesting the authentication, which is subject to a race
condition.
A local attacker can therefore bypass the KAuth authentication, in
order to escalate his privileges.
ACCESS TO THE COMPLETE VIGIL@NCE BULLETIN
http://vigilance.fr/vulnerability/KAuth-privilege-escalation-via-UnixProcess-15076
