Please Install the Updated Packages.

Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) provide a system whereby administrators can set up authentication policies without having to recompile programs that handle authentication. It was discovered that the pam_namespace module executed the external script namespace.init with an unchanged environment inherited from an application calling PAM. In cases where such an environment was untrusted (for example, when pam_namespace was configured for setuid applications such as su or sudo), a local, unprivileged user could possibly use this flaw to escalate their privileges. (CVE-2010-3853) It was discovered that the pam_mail module used root privileges while accessing users' files. In certain configurations, a local, unprivileged user could use this flaw to obtain limited information about files or directories that they do not have access to. (CVE-2010-3435) It was discovered that the pam_xauth module did not verify the return values of the setuid() and setgid() system calls. A local, unprivileged user could use this flaw to execute the xauth command with root privileges and make it read an arbitrary input file. (CVE-2010-3316) Red Hat would like to thank Sebastian Krahmer of the SuSE Security Team for reporting the CVE-2010-3435 issue. All pam users should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues.

pam on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (v. 5 server)

• https://www.redhat.com/archives/rhsa-announce/2010-November/msg00001.html

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Updated on 2015-03-25