CESA-2007:1177: RHSA-2007:1177

Description

Important: autofs5 security updateThe autofs utility controls the operation of the automount daemon, whichautomatically mounts file systems when you use them, and unmounts them whenyou are not using them. This can include network file systems and CD-ROMs.The autofs5 packages were made available as a technology preview in Red HatEnterprise Linux 4.6.There was a security issue with the default configuration of autofs version5, whereby the entry for the "-hosts" map did not specify the "nodev" mountoption. A local user with control of a remote NFS server could createspecial device files on the remote file system, that if mounted using thedefault "-hosts" map, could allow the user to access important systemdevices. (CVE-2007-6285)This issue is similar to CVE-2007-5964, which fixed a missing "nosuid"mount option in autofs. Both the "nodev" and "nosuid" options should beenabled to prevent a possible compromise of machine integrity.Due to the fact that autofs always mounted "-hosts" map entries "dev" bydefault, autofs has now been altered to always use the "nodev" option whenmounting from the default "-hosts" map. The "dev" option must be explicitlygiven in the master map entry to revert to the old behavior. This changeaffects only the "-hosts" map which corresponds to the "/net" entry in thedefault configuration.All autofs5 users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, whichresolve this issue.Red Hat would like to thank Tim Baum for reporting this issue.