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On BUGTRAQ, Christian Esken writes:

KDE Screensavers are usually running SUID root. Security issues have been posted to Bugtraq on Nov 16 1998, under the subject "KDE 1.0's klock can be used to gain root priveledges". The KDE team has now published a fix for the KDE1.0 branch and the current branch.

With this change, screensavers and klock are not running SUID anymore. This will solve every potential exploit, like misuse of buffer overruns to gain root rights or executing a wrong executable under SUID rights.

The following text explains the technique used to solve the problem. An advisory for distributors, users and administrators follows the technical description.

Technique
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An authentification program, kcheckpass, has been introduced. This is a separate, helper program, that runs SUID and is called each time a password has to be checked. The password is passed via STDIN to the program and the result of the authentification process is returned in the return code of the program. This program is small and supposed to be free from security hazzles.

Advisory
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Administrators should remove any SUID bit from KDE executables.

After updating to the fixed KDE1.0 tree or to the current KDE, administrators should

1. check the access rights of the installed executables. The screensavers must not be installed SUID anymore. If in doubt, remove the SUID bits manually by a suitable command, like "chmod -s *.kss klock" under Linux.
2. check the access rights of the kcheckpass program. This program should only be installed SUID root under certain authentification systems, like the shadow password suite.
3. Distributions using the shadow password system can be made more secure by creating a "shadow" group and setting the access rights of /etc/shadow and kcheckpass like in the following example:

 
 -rw-r-----   1 root     shadow        746 Sep  2 21:35 /etc/shadow
 -rwxr-sr-x   1 root     shadow       4720 Nov 17 22:32 /opt/kde/bin/kcheckpass

Availability of the fix
-----------------------

The patches are already integrated in the KDE1.0 and the KDE1.1 branches. You can use cvs/cvsup to get current sources. You can also get the patch from KDE's ftp Server ftp://ftp.kde.org and its mirrors, which you can apply against a clean KDE1.0 kdebase package.

It has been uploaded under the name kdebase1.0-klock-patch and should show up soon on a suitable place on KDE's ftp Server. The precise location will be announced later, for example http://www.kde.org/news_dyn.html will provide this information as soon as it available.