arpwatch 2.1a15, as used by Red Hat, Debian, Fedora, and possibly others, does not properly drop supplementary groups, which might allow attackers to gain root privileges by leveraging other vulnerabilities in the daemon.

The remote Redhat Enterprise Linux 6 host has one or more packages installed that are affected by a vulnerability that has been acknowledged by the vendor but will not be patched.

  - arpwatch: fails to drop supplementary groups (CVE-2012-2653)

Note that Nessus has not tested for this issue but has instead relied on the package manager's report that the package is installed.

The remote host is affected by the vulnerability described in GLSA-201607-16 (arpwatch: Privilege escalation)

    Arpwatch does not properly drop supplementary groups.
  Impact :

    Attackers, if able to exploit arpwatch, could escalate privileges       outside of the running process.
  Workaround :

    There is no known workaround at this time.

Changes in arpwatch :

  - arpwatch-2.1a11-drop-privs.dif: call initgroups() with     pw->pw_gid, not NULL, to not have groupid 0 initialized.
    (bnc#764521, CVE-2012-2653)

A vulnerability has been discovered and corrected in arpwatch :

arpwatch 2.1a15, as used by Red Hat, Debian, Fedora, and possibly others, does not properly drop supplementary groups, which might allow attackers to gain root privileges by leveraging other vulnerabilities in the daemon (CVE-2012-2653).

The updated packages have been patched to correct this issue.

NOTE: This advisory was previousely given the MDVSA-2013:017 identifier by mistake.

arpwatch was improperly dropping its privileges. This has been fixed.

A vulnerability has been discovered and corrected in arpwatch :

arpwatch 2.1a15, as used by Red Hat, Debian, Fedora, and possibly others, does not properly drop supplementary groups, which might allow attackers to gain root privileges by leveraging other vulnerabilities in the daemon (CVE-2012-2653).

The updated packages have been patched to correct this issue.

Steve Grubb from Red Hat discovered that a patch for arpwatch (as shipped at least in Red Hat and Debian distributions) in order to make it drop root privileges would fail to do so and instead add the root group to the list of the daemon uses.

with '-u' fix supplementary group list (#825328) (CVE-2012-2653)

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.

ID	Name	Product	Family	Severity
198841	RHEL 6 : arpwatch (Unpatched Vulnerability)	Nessus	Red Hat Local Security Checks	critical
92486	GLSA-201607-16 : arpwatch: Privilege escalation	Nessus	Gentoo Local Security Checks	critical
74689	openSUSE Security Update : arpwatch (openSUSE-SU-2012:0915-1)	Nessus	SuSE Local Security Checks	critical
66044	Mandriva Linux Security Advisory : arpwatch (MDVSA-2013:030)	Nessus	Mandriva Local Security Checks	critical
64109	SuSE 11.1 Security Update : arpwatch (SAT Patch Number 6570)	Nessus	SuSE Local Security Checks	critical
61966	Mandriva Linux Security Advisory : arpwatch (MDVSA-2012:113)	Nessus	Mandriva Local Security Checks	critical
59759	Debian DSA-2481-1 : arpwatch - fails to drop supplementary groups	Nessus	Debian Local Security Checks	critical
59573	Fedora 15 : arpwatch-2.1a15-16.fc15 (2012-8702)	Nessus	Fedora Local Security Checks	critical
59572	Fedora 17 : arpwatch-2.1a15-20.fc17 (2012-8677)	Nessus	Fedora Local Security Checks	critical
59571	Fedora 16 : arpwatch-2.1a15-18.fc16 (2012-8675)	Nessus	Fedora Local Security Checks	critical

Detections

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CVE-2012-2653

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