Vulnerabilities > CVE-2017-12164 - Improper Initialization vulnerability in Gnome Display Manager 3.24.1
Attack vector
PHYSICAL Attack complexity
HIGH Privileges required
NONE Confidentiality impact
HIGH Integrity impact
HIGH Availability impact
HIGH Summary
A flaw was discovered in gdm 3.24.1 where gdm greeter was no longer setting the ran_once boolean during autologin. If autologin was enabled for a victim, an attacker could simply select 'login as another user' to unlock their screen.
Vulnerable Configurations
| Part | Description | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Application | 1 |
Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)
Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)
- Leveraging Race Conditions This attack targets a race condition occurring when multiple processes access and manipulate the same resource concurrently and the outcome of the execution depends on the particular order in which the access takes place. The attacker can leverage a race condition by "running the race", modifying the resource and modifying the normal execution flow. For instance a race condition can occur while accessing a file, the attacker can trick the system by replacing the original file with his version and cause the system to read the malicious file.
- Leveraging Time-of-Check and Time-of-Use (TOCTOU) Race Conditions This attack targets a race condition occurring between the time of check (state) for a resource and the time of use of a resource. The typical example is the file access. The attacker can leverage a file access race condition by "running the race", meaning that he would modify the resource between the first time the target program accesses the file and the time the target program uses the file. During that period of time, the attacker could do something such as replace the file and cause an escalation of privilege.
Nessus
| NASL family | Fedora Local Security Checks |
| NASL id | FEDORA_2017-E7AE1ED967.NASL |
| description | Update to 3.24.3 to address CVE-2017-12164 (lock screen bypass when using autologin) Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Fedora update system website. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues. |
| last seen | 2020-06-05 |
| modified | 2017-09-18 |
| plugin id | 103269 |
| published | 2017-09-18 |
| reporter | This script is Copyright (C) 2017-2020 and is owned by Tenable, Inc. or an Affiliate thereof. |
| source | https://www.tenable.com/plugins/nessus/103269 |
| title | Fedora 26 : 1:gdm (2017-e7ae1ed967) |
| code | |