The Config::IniFiles module before 2.71 for Perl creates temporary files with predictable names, which allows local users to overwrite arbitrary files via a symlink attack. NOTE: some of these details are obtained from third party information. NOTE: it has been reported that this might only be exploitable by writing in the same directory as the .ini file. If this is the case, then this issue might not cross privilege boundaries.

It was discovered that the perl Config::IniFiles module created temporary files in an unsafe manner. A local user with write access to the directory containing a configuration file that Config-IniFiles manipulates could exploit this to overwrite arbitrary files.

Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Ubuntu security advisory. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues.

The remote host is affected by the vulnerability described in GLSA-201208-05 (Perl Config-IniFiles Module: Insecure temporary file usage)

    The Perl Config-IniFiles module uses predicatable temporary file names.
  Impact :

    A local attacker could perform symlink attacks to overwrite arbitrary       files with the privileges of the user running the application.
  Workaround :

    There is no known workaround at this time.

Update to 2.72, fixes CVE-2012-2451.

Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Fedora security advisory. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues.

Unsafe Temporary file creation

Config::IniFiles used a predictable name for its temporary file without opening it correctly.

ID	Name	Product	Family	Severity
61608	Ubuntu 10.04 LTS / 11.04 / 11.10 / 12.04 LTS : libconfig-inifiles-perl vulnerability (USN-1543-1)	Nessus	Ubuntu Local Security Checks	low
61544	GLSA-201208-05 : Perl Config-IniFiles Module: Insecure temporary file usage	Nessus	Gentoo Local Security Checks	low
59271	Fedora 17 : perl-Config-IniFiles-2.72-1.fc17 (2012-7763)	Nessus	Fedora Local Security Checks	low
59219	Fedora 15 : perl-Config-IniFiles-2.72-1.fc15 (2012-7802)	Nessus	Fedora Local Security Checks	low
59218	Fedora 16 : perl-Config-IniFiles-2.72-1.fc16 (2012-7777)	Nessus	Fedora Local Security Checks	low
59026	FreeBSD : p5-Config-IniFiles -- unsafe temporary file creation (725ab25a-987b-11e1-a2ef-001fd0af1a4c)	Nessus	FreeBSD Local Security Checks	low

Detections

Analytics

CVE-2012-2451

high

Tenable Plugins

low

low

low

low

low

low