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mate-settings-daemon: insecure timezones

Package(s):mate-settings-daemon CVE #(s):CVE-2012-5560
Created:December 17, 2012 Updated:March 4, 2013
Description: From the Red Hat bugzilla:

mate-settings-daemon's datetime mechanism provides a D-Bus method to set the timezone, which is guarded by polkit's action org.mate.settingsdaemon.datetimemechanism.settimezone; this has the default policy "auth_self_keep", which allows any local user to perform the operation with only knowing their own password.

This seems not to be currently exposed in the mate UI, but it is available through manual D-Bus calls, e.g. > dbus-send --system --print-reply --type=method_call --dest=org.mate.SettingsDaemon.DateTimeMechanism / org.mate.SettingsDaemon.DateTimeMechanism.SetTimezone string:/usr/share/zoneinfo/Cuba

Because the time zone setting is a global resource, it should be restricted to system administrators (== root or users in the "wheel" group), by having a policy auth_admin_*. That's also what the other timezone setting mechanisms (in systemd and control-center) do.

Alerts:
Fedora FEDORA-2012-19726 2012-12-15
Fedora FEDORA-2013-2784 2013-03-03
Fedora FEDORA-2013-2766 2013-03-03

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