Gentoo's GIMPS ebuilds are vulnerable to privilege escalation due to improper permissions. A local attacker could use it to gain root privileges.
| Package | Arch | Vulnerable | Unaffected |
|---|---|---|---|
| sci-mathematics/gimps | * | < 28.10-r1 | >= 28.10-r1 |
GIMPS, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, is a software capable of find Mersenne Primes, which are used in cryptography. GIMPS is also used for hardware testing.
It was discovered that Gentoo’s default GIMPS installation suffered from a privilege escalation vulnerability in the init script. This script calls an unsafe “chown -R” command in checkconfig() function.
A local attacker who does not belong to the root group, but has the ability to modify the /var/lib/gimps directory can escalate privileges to the root group.
There is no known workaround at this time.
All GIMPS users should upgrade to the latest version:
# emerge --sync # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=sci-mathematics/gimps-28.10-r1"