Solution
Please Install the Updated Packages.
Insight
The GNOME Display Manager (GDM) provides the graphical login screen, shown shortly after boot up, log out, and when user-switching.
A race condition flaw was found in the way GDM handled the cache directories used to store users' dmrc and face icon files. A local attacker could use this flaw to trick GDM into changing the ownership of an arbitrary file via a symbolic link attack, allowing them to escalate their privileges. (CVE-2011-0727)
Red Hat would like to thank Sebastian Krahmer of the SuSE Security Team for reporting this issue.
All users should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain a backported patch to correct this issue. GDM must be restarted for this update to take effect. Rebooting achieves this, but changing the runlevel from 5 to 3 and back to 5 also restarts GDM.
Affected
gdm on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop (v. 6),
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (v. 6),
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation (v. 6)
References
Updated on 2015-03-25
Severity
Classification
-
CVE CVE-2011-0727 -
CVSS Base Score: 6.9
AV:L/AC:M/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:C
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