The Sleuth Kit (TSK) 4.0.1 does not properly handle "." (dotfile) file system entries in FAT file systems and other file systems for which . is not a reserved name, which allows local users to hide activities it more difficult to conduct forensics activities, as demonstrated by Flame.

The remote Ubuntu 16.04 ESM host has packages installed that are affected by multiple vulnerabilities as referenced in the USN-4765-1 advisory.

    It was discovered that The Sleuth Kit did not properly handle certain entires in FAT file systems. An     attacker could use this vulnerability to mislead an analyst and obscure their activities. This issue only     affected Ubuntu 14.04 ESM. (CVE-2012-5619)

    It was discovered that The Sleuth Kit mishandled certain crafted ISO 9660 images. If an analyst were     tricked into opening a malicious image, an attacker could cause a denial of service (crash).
    (CVE-2017-13755)

Tenable has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Ubuntu security advisory.

Note that Nessus has not tested for these issues but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

Updated sleuthkit packages fix security vulnerabilities :

A security flaw was found in the way the Sleuth Kit (TSK), a collection of UNIX-based command line tools allowing to investigate a computer, performed management of \'.\' (dotfile) file system entry.
An attacker could use this flaw to evade detection by forensic analysis (hide certain files not to be scanned) by renaming the file in question it to be \'.\' file system entry.

The original reports speaks about this attack vector to be present when scanning FAT (File Allocation Table) file system. It is possible though, the flaw to be present on other file systems, which do not reserve usage of \'.\' entry for special purpose, too.

New Features: More DOS partition types are displayed. Added fcat tool that takes in file name and exports content (equivalent to using ifind and icat together). performance improvements with FAT code (maps and dir_add) performance improvements with NTFS code (maps) added AONLY flag to block_walk Updated blkls and blkcalc to use AONLY flag -- MUCH faster.

Bug Fixes: Fixed mactime issue where it could choose the wrong timezone that did not follow daylight savings times. Fixed file size of alternate data streams in framework. Incorporated memory leak fixes and raw device fixes from ADF Solutions.

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
183571	Ubuntu 16.04 ESM : The Sleuth Kit vulnerabilities (USN-4765-1)	Nessus	Ubuntu Local Security Checks	medium
66137	Mandriva Linux Security Advisory : sleuthkit (MDVSA-2013:125)	Nessus	Mandriva Local Security Checks	low
63651	Fedora 17 : sleuthkit-4.0.1-1.fc17 (2013-0336)	Nessus	Fedora Local Security Checks	low
63650	Fedora 18 : sleuthkit-4.0.1-1.fc18 (2013-0320)	Nessus	Fedora Local Security Checks	low

Detections

Analytics

CVE-2012-5619

medium

Tenable Plugins

medium

low

low

low