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______________________________________________________________________________
                   Caldera International, Inc. Security Advisory

Subject: webmin root account leak
Advisory number: CSSA-2001-019.0
Issue date: 2001 May, 30
Cross reference:
______________________________________________________________________________

1. Problem Description

   When starting system daemons from the webmin webfrontend, webmin
   does not clear its environment variables. Since these variables
   contain the authorization of the administrator, any daemon gets
   these variables.

   If the apache web server has been (re)started from webmin, a simple
   attack would be to write a CGI scripts which just dumps all environment
   variables, which contain the root password in a base64 encoded string.

   This is just a preliminary advisory until we have fixed packages
   available.

2. Vulnerable Versions

   System Package
   -----------------------------------------------------------
   OpenLinux 2.3 not vulnerable

   OpenLinux eServer 2.3.1 All webmin packages.
   and OpenLinux eBuilder

   OpenLinux eDesktop 2.4 All webmin packages.

3. Solution

   Workaround

      Disable the webmin service until fixed packages are available.

      Reboot your machine to make sure all daemons are restarted without
      tainted environment variables, or at least run as root:

              /etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd stop
        /etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd start

      to avoid trivial exploits.

   We will release fixed packages in the next few days.

4. Disclaimer

   Caldera International, Inc. is not responsible for the misuse of
   any of the information we provide on this website and/or through our
   security advisories. Our advisories are a service to our customers
   intended to promote secure installation and use of Caldera OpenLinux.

5. Acknowledgements:

   Caldera International does acknowledge J. Nick Koston for reporting
   the problem, but would appreciate if vendors would get notified first
   before posting to BugTraq.
______________________________________________________________________________
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