Exim 4.72 and earlier allows local users to gain privileges by leveraging the ability of the exim user account to specify an alternate configuration file with a directive that contains arbitrary commands, as demonstrated by the spooldirectory directive.

Description of problem: The handling functions for sending and receiving messages, in rdspagecopyuser(), use the unchecked copyuserinatomic functions without any access checks on user-provided pointers. As a result, by passing a kernel address as an iovec base address in recvmsg-style calls, a local user can overwrite arbitrary kernel memory, which can easily be used to escalate privileges to root.

Introduced via 7875e18e (v2.6.30-rc1).

Acknowledgements:

Red Hat would like to thank Dan Rosenberg of Virtual Security Research for reporting this issue.