RHEL 5 : autofs (RHSA-2013:0132)

critical Nessus Plugin ID 63413

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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-2013:0132 advisory.

The autofs utility controls the operation of the automount daemon. The automount daemon automatically mounts and unmounts file systems.

A bug fix included in RHBA-2012:0264 introduced a denial of service flaw in autofs. When using autofs with LDAP, a local user could use this flaw to crash autofs, preventing future mount requests from being processed until the autofs service was restarted. Note: This flaw did not impact existing mounts (except for preventing mount expiration). (CVE-2012-2697)

Red Hat would like to thank Ray Rocker for reporting this issue.

This update also fixes the following bugs:

* The autofs init script sometimes timed out waiting for the automount daemon to exit and returned a shutdown failure if the daemon failed to exit in time. To resolve this problem, the amount of time that the init script waits for the daemon has been increased to allow for cases where servers are slow to respond or there are many active mounts. (BZ#585058)

* Due to an omission when backporting a change, autofs attempted to download the entire LDAP map at startup. This mistake has now been corrected. (BZ#767428)

* A function to check the validity of a mount location was meant to check only for a small subset of map location errors. A recent modification in error reporting inverted a logic test in this validating function.
Consequently, the scope of the test was widened, which caused the automount daemon to report false positive failures. With this update, the faulty logic test has been corrected and false positive failures no longer occur.
(BZ#798448)

* When there were many attempts to access invalid or non-existent keys, the automount daemon used excessive CPU resources. As a consequence, systems sometimes became unresponsive. The code has been improved so that automount checks for invalid keys earlier in the process which has eliminated a significant amount of the processing overhead. (BZ#847101)

* The auto.master(5) man page did not document the -t, --timeout option in the FORMAT options section. This update adds this information to the man page. (BZ#859890)

This update also adds the following enhancement:

* Previously, it was not possible to configure separate timeout values for individual direct map entries in the autofs master map. This update adds this functionality. (BZ#690404)

All users of autofs 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 autofs package.

Plugin Details

Severity: Critical

ID: 63413

File Name: redhat-RHSA-2013-0132.nasl

Version: 1.19

Type: local

Agent: unix

Family: Red Hat Local Security Checks

Published: 1/8/2013

Updated: 11/4/2024

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

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 6.5

Vendor

Vendor Severity: Low

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 4.9

Temporal Score: 3.6

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

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2012-2697

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: Critical

Base Score: 10

Temporal Score: 8.7

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/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:autofs, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:5

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

Exploit Ease: No known exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 1/8/2013

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2012-2697

RHSA: 2013:0132

Detections

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