The default configuration of udev on Linux does not warn the user before enabling additional Human Interface Device (HID) functionality over USB, which allows user-assisted attackers to execute arbitrary programs via crafted USB data, as demonstrated by keyboard and mouse data sent by malware on a smartphone that the user connected to the computer.

plymouth-pretrigger.sh in dracut and udev, when running on Fedora 13 and 14, sets weak permissions for the /dev/systty device file, which allows remote authenticated users to read terminal data from tty0 for local users.

Buffer overflow in the utilpathencode function in udev/lib/libudev-util.c in udev before 1.4.1 allows local users to cause a denial of service (service outage) via vectors that trigger a call with crafted arguments.

A privilege escalation flaw was found in the way udev used to check for the origin of messages sent from the NETLINK service. An attacker could use this flaw to escalate his privileges by sending the NETLINK message from userspace process, instead of from the kernel.

Acknowledgements:

Red Hat would like to thank Sebastian Krahmer of the SUSE Security Team for responsibly reporting this flaw.