Vulnerabilities > CVE-2004-0395 - Privilege Escalation vulnerability in Gatos .5
Attack vector
LOCAL Attack complexity
LOW Privileges required
NONE Confidentiality impact
COMPLETE Integrity impact
COMPLETE Availability impact
COMPLETE Summary
The xatitv program in the gatos package does not properly drop root privileges when the configuration file does not exist, which allows local users to execute arbitrary commands via shell metacharacters in a system call.
Vulnerable Configurations
| Part | Description | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Application | 1 |
Nessus
| NASL family | Debian Local Security Checks |
| NASL id | DEBIAN_DSA-509.NASL |
| description | Steve Kemp discovered a vulnerability in xatitv, one of the programs in the gatos package, which is used to display video with certain ATI video cards. xatitv is installed setuid root in order to gain direct access to the video hardware. It normally drops root privileges after successfully initializing itself. However, if initialization fails due to a missing configuration file, root privileges are not dropped, and xatitv executes the system(3) function to launch its configuration program without sanitizing user-supplied environment variables. By exploiting this vulnerability, a local user could gain root privileges if the configuration file does not exist. However, a default configuration file is supplied with the package, and so this vulnerability is not exploitable unless this file is removed by the administrator. |
| last seen | 2020-06-01 |
| modified | 2020-06-02 |
| plugin id | 15346 |
| published | 2004-09-29 |
| reporter | This script is Copyright (C) 2004-2019 Tenable Network Security, Inc. |
| source | https://www.tenable.com/plugins/nessus/15346 |
| title | Debian DSA-509-1 : gatos - privilege escalation |