First published: Fri Oct 08 2010(Updated: )
Dmitri Gribenko discovered that the soffice script in the Openoffice.org package contained an insecure setting for the LD_LIBRARY_PATH, which could be abused by an attacker to execute arbitrary code. The vulnerability is due to an insecure change to LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and environment variable used by ld.so(8) to look for libraries in directories other than the standard paths. When there is an empty item in the colon-separated list of directories in LD_LIBRARY_PATH, ld.so(8) treats it as a '.' (current working directory). If the given script is executed from a directory where a local attacker could write files, there is a chance for exploitation. Currently in our soffice script we do... LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$my_path${LD_LIBRARY_PATH+:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH} while we should do... LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$my_path${LD_LIBRARY_PATH:+:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH} so if someone currently does export LD_LIBRARY_PATH= then our LD_LIBRARY_PATH ends up as LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path: which has an empty entry which effectively means LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path:. Acknowledgements: Red Hat would like to thank Dmitri Gribenko for reporting this issue.
Credit: secalert@redhat.com
Affected Software | Affected Version | How to fix |
---|---|---|
Apache OpenOffice | >=3.0.0<3.3.0 | |
Debian | =5.0 | |
Ubuntu | =10.10 | |
Debian | =6.0 | |
Ubuntu | =9.10 | |
Ubuntu | =8.04 | |
Ubuntu | =10.04 |
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CVE-2010-3689 is classified as a high severity vulnerability due to the potential for arbitrary code execution.
To fix CVE-2010-3689, update OpenOffice.org to a version that corrects the insecure LD_LIBRARY_PATH setting.
CVE-2010-3689 affects multiple versions of OpenOffice.org as well as Debian and Ubuntu Linux distributions.
CVE-2010-3689 requires local access to exploit the vulnerability, making it less likely to be exploited remotely.
A potential workaround for CVE-2010-3689 is to manually adjust the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable or restrict access to the soffice script until an update is applied.