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gdm: privilege escalation

Package(s):gdm CVE #(s):CVE-2013-4169
Created:September 6, 2013 Updated:September 11, 2013
Description:

From the Red Hat advisory:

A race condition was found in the way GDM handled the X server sockets directory located in the system temporary directory. An unprivileged user could use this flaw to perform a symbolic link attack, giving them write access to any file, allowing them to escalate their privileges to root. (CVE-2013-4169)

Note that this erratum includes an updated initscripts package. To fix CVE-2013-4169, the vulnerable code was removed from GDM and the initscripts package was modified to create the affected directory safely during the system boot process. Therefore, this update will appear on all systems, however systems without GDM installed are not affected by this flaw.

Alerts:
CentOS CESA-2013:1213 2013-09-06
CentOS CESA-2013:1213 2013-09-05
Oracle ELSA-2013-1213 2013-09-05
Red Hat RHSA-2013:1213-01 2013-09-05
Scientific Linux SLSA-2013:1213-1 2013-09-05
Mandriva MDVSA-2013:230 2013-09-11

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