CentOS 6 / 7 : pam (CESA-2015:1640)

medium Nessus Plugin ID 85516

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Synopsis

The remote CentOS host is missing one or more security updates.

Description

An updated pam package that fixes one security issue is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7.

Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having Moderate security impact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available from the CVE link in the References section.

Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) provide a system whereby administrators can set up authentication policies without having to recompile programs to handle authentication.

It was discovered that the _unix_run_helper_binary() function of PAM's unix_pam module could write to a blocking pipe, possibly causing the function to become unresponsive. An attacker able to supply large passwords to the unix_pam module could use this flaw to enumerate valid user accounts, or cause a denial of service on the system.
(CVE-2015-3238)

Red Hat would like to thank Sebastien Macke of Trustwave SpiderLabs for reporting this issue.

All pam users are advised to upgrade to this updated package, which contains a backported patch to correct this issue.

Solution

Update the affected pam packages.

Plugin Details

Severity: Medium

ID: 85516

File Name: centos_RHSA-2015-1640.nasl

Version: 2.11

Type: local

Agent: unix

Family: CentOS Local Security Checks

Published: 8/19/2015

Updated: 1/4/2021

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

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Low

Score: 3.3

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 5.8

Temporal Score: 4.3

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

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2015-3238

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 6.5

Temporal Score: 5.7

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

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

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:centos:centos:pam-devel, cpe:/o:centos:centos:7, p-cpe:/a:centos:centos:pam, cpe:/o:centos:centos:6

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

Exploit Ease: No known exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 8/18/2015

Vulnerability Publication Date: 8/24/2015

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2015-3238

RHSA: 2015:1640

Detections

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