Multiple vulnerabilities in the PDFjam scripts allow for local privilege escalation.

Announced

2009-03-07

Revised

2009-03-07

Access

local

Bugs

#252734

Advisory

https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/200903-05

Affected packages

Package	Arch	Vulnerable	Unaffected
app-text/pdfjam	*	< 1.20-r1	>= 1.20-r1

Background

PDFjam is a small collection of shell scripts to edit PDF documents, including pdfnup, pdfjoin and pdf90.

Description

• Martin Vaeth reported multiple untrusted search path vulnerabilities (CVE-2008-5843).
• Marcus Meissner of the SUSE Security Team reported that temporary files are created with a predictable name (CVE-2008-5743).

Impact

A local attacker could place a specially crafted Python module in the current working directory or the /var/tmp directory, and entice a user to run the PDFjam scripts, leading to the execution of arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running the application. A local attacker could also leverage symlink attacks to overwrite arbitrary files.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All PDFjam users should upgrade to the latest version:

# emerge --sync
# emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=app-text/pdfjam-1.20-r1"

References

• CVE-2008-5843
• CVE-2008-5743