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Subject: apcupsd 3.7.2 Denial of Service
From: Mattias Dartsch (matzeJOONIX.DE)
Date: Wed Dec 06 2000 - 12:07:11 CST

Title: apcupsd 3.7.2 Denial of Service

Affected Application: apcupsd daemon

Affected Versions: 3.7.2 and maybe prior

Not affected: 3.8.0 and above

Affected Platforms: all Linux / Unix

Vulnerability Class: Denial of Service (local)

Author Notified: Yes July 12th 2000

Fix available: Yes (included)

Description:

Apcupsd is a daemon for controlling most of APC's UPS models on Unix and
Windows machines. The Unix daemon runs as root and shuts the machine down in
case of a power failure.

Problem:

During startup apcupsd creates a PID-file named "apcupsd.pid" in /var/run
(system specific, maybe other directory) with the ID of the daemon process,
this PID-file is used by the shutdown-script to kill the daemon process.

Unfortunatly this PID-file ist world-writeable (Mode 666, -rw-rw-rw). A
malicious user can overwrite the file with arbitrary process ID's, these
processes will be killed instead of the apcupsd process during restart or
stop of the apcupsd daemon and during system shutdown or restart, the whole
system can be crashed this way.

Solution:

Upgrade to apcupsd Version 3.8.0 .

It's available at:

http://www.sibbald.com/apcupsd/
http://www.oasi.gpa.it/riccardo/linux/apcupsd/
ftp://ftp.oasi.gpa.it/pub/apcupsd/

User's who don't want to upgrade can add two lines to the "start" section in
the apcupsd startup script in /etc/rc.d or /sbin/init.d :

---begin---

    start)
        rm -f /etc/apcupsd/powerfail
        rm -f /etc/nologin
        echo -n "Starting apcupsd power management"
        $APCUPSD || return=$rc_failed

        # give the daemon some little time to create the PID-file
        sleep 1

        #now simply chmod the PID-file to Mode 644
        chmod 644 /var/run/apcupsd.pid

        echo -e "$return"
    ;;

---end---

Mattias Dartsch

matzejoonix.de