Lookup: Insecure temporary file creation — GLSA 200712-07

Lookup uses temporary files in an insecure manner, allowing for a symlink attack.

Affected packages

app-emacs/lookup on all architectures
Affected versions < 1.4.1
Unaffected versions >= 1.4.1

Background

Lookup is a search interface to books and dictionnaries for Emacs.

Description

Tatsuya Kinoshita reported that the ndeb-binary function does not handle temporay files correctly.

Impact

A local attacker could use a symlink attack to overwrite files with the privileges of the user running Lookup.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All Lookup users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=app-emacs/lookup-1.4.1"

References

Release date
December 09, 2007

Latest revision
December 09, 2007: 01

Severity
normal

Exploitable
local

Bugzilla entries