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texindex -- temporary file privilege escalation

Description:

Problem description

The "sort_offline" function used by texindex(1) employs the "maketempname" function, which produces predictable file names and fails to validate that the paths do not exist.

Impact

These predictable temporary file names are problematic because they allow an attacker to take advantage of a race condition in order to execute a symlink attack, which could enable them to overwrite files on the system in the context of the user running the texindex(1) utility.

Workaround

No workaround is available, but the problematic code is only executed if the input file being processed is 500kB or more in length; as a result, users working with documents of less than several hundred pages are very unlikely to be affected.

References:

Affects:

portaudit: texindex -- temporary file privilege escalation

Disclaimer: The data contained on this page is derived from the VuXML document, please refer to the the original document for copyright information. The author of portaudit makes no claim of authorship or ownership of any of the information contained herein.

If you have found a vulnerability in a FreeBSD port not listed in the database, please contact the FreeBSD Security Officer. Refer to "FreeBSD Security Information" for more information.


Oliver Eikemeier <eik@FreeBSD.org>