RHEL 5 : sysstat (RHSA-2011:1005)

high Nessus Plugin ID 55644

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Synopsis

The remote Red Hat host is missing a security update.

Description

The remote Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 host has a package installed that is affected by a vulnerability as referenced in the RHSA-2011:1005 advisory.

The sysstat package contains a set of utilities which enable system monitoring of disks, network, and other I/O activity.

It was found that the sysstat initscript created a temporary file in an insecure way. A local attacker could use this flaw to create arbitrary files via a symbolic link attack. (CVE-2007-3852)

This update fixes the following bugs:

* On systems under heavy load, the sadc utility would sometimes output the following error message if a write() call was unable to write all of the requested input:

Cannot write data to system activity file: Success.

In this updated package, the sadc utility tries to write the remaining input, resolving this issue. (BZ#454617)

* On the Itanium architecture, the sar -I command provided incorrect information about the interrupt statistics of the system. With this update, the sar -I command has been disabled for this architecture, preventing this bug. (BZ#468340)

* Previously, the iostat -n command used invalid data to create statistics for read and write operations. With this update, the data source for these statistics has been fixed, and the iostat utility now returns correct information. (BZ#484439)

* The sar -d command used to output invalid data about block devices.
With this update, the sar utility recognizes disk registration and disk overflow statistics properly, and only correct and relevant data is now displayed. (BZ#517490)

* Previously, the sar utility set the maximum number of days to be logged in one month too high. Consequently, data from a month was appended to data from the preceding month. With this update, the maximum number of days has been set to 25, and data from a month now correctly replaces data from the preceding month. (BZ#578929)

* In previous versions of the iostat utility, the number of NFS mount points was hard-coded. Consequently, various issues occurred while iostat was running and NFS mount points were mounted or unmounted; certain values in iostat reports overflowed and some mount points were not reported at all. With this update, iostat properly recognizes when an NFS mount point mounts or unmounts, fixing these issues. (BZ#675058, BZ#706095, BZ#694767)

* When a device name was longer than 13 characters, the iostat utility printed a redundant new line character, making its output less readable.
This bug has been fixed and now, no extra characters are printed if a long device name occurs in iostat output. (BZ#604637)

* Previously, if kernel interrupt counters overflowed, the sar utility provided confusing output. This bug has been fixed and the sum of interrupts is now reported correctly. (BZ#622557)

* When some processors were disabled on a multi-processor system, the sar utility sometimes failed to provide information about the CPU activity.
With this update, the uptime of a single processor is used to compute the statistics, rather than the total uptime of all processors, and this bug no longer occurs. (BZ#630559)

* Previously, the mpstat utility wrongly interpreted data about processors in the system. Consequently, it reported a processor that did not exist.
This bug has been fixed and non-existent CPUs are no longer reported by mpstat. (BZ#579409)

* Previously, there was no easy way to enable the collection of statistics about disks and interrupts. Now, the SADC_OPTIONS variable can be used to set parameters for the sadc utility, fixing this bug. (BZ#598794)

* The read_uptime() function failed to close its open file upon exit. A patch has been provided to fix this bug. (BZ#696672)

This update also adds the following enhancement:

* With this update, the cifsiostat utility has been added to the sysstat package to provide CIFS (Common Internet File System) mount point I/O statistics. (BZ#591530)

All sysstat users are advised to upgrade to this updated package, which contains backported patches to correct these issues and add this enhancement.

Tenable has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux security advisory.

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

Solution

Update the affected sysstat package.

Plugin Details

Severity: High

ID: 55644

File Name: redhat-RHSA-2011-1005.nasl

Version: 1.17

Type: local

Agent: unix

Family: Red Hat Local Security Checks

Published: 7/22/2011

Updated: 3/20/2025

Supported Sensors: Frictionless Assessment AWS, Frictionless Assessment Azure, Frictionless Assessment Agent, Nessus Agent, Agentless Assessment, Continuous Assessment, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 5.9

Vendor

Vendor Severity: Low

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 4.4

Temporal Score: 3.3

Vector: CVSS2#AV:L/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2007-3852

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.8

Temporal Score: 6.8

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Temporal Vector: CVSS:3.0/E:U/RL:O/RC:C

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:sysstat, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:5

Required KB Items: Host/local_checks_enabled, Host/RedHat/release, Host/RedHat/rpm-list, Host/cpu

Exploit Available: true

Exploit Ease: Exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 7/21/2011

Vulnerability Publication Date: 8/14/2007

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2007-3852

BID: 25380

CWE: 377

RHSA: 2011:1005

Detections

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