Issued:
2013-01-08
Updated:
2013-01-08

RHSA-2013:0132 - Low: autofs security, bug fix, and enhancement update

Synopsis

Low: autofs security, bug fix, and enhancement update

Type/Severity

Security Advisory Low

Topic

An updated autofs package that fixes one security issue, several bugs, and adds one enhancement is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having low security impact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available from the CVE link in the References section.

Description

The autofs utility controls the operation of the automount daemon. The automount daemon automatically mounts and unmounts file systems.

A bug fix included in RHBA-2012:0264 introduced a denial of service flaw in autofs. When using autofs with LDAP, a local user could use this flaw to crash autofs, preventing future mount requests from being processed until the autofs service was restarted. Note: This flaw did not impact existing mounts (except for preventing mount expiration). (CVE-2012-2697)

Red Hat would like to thank Ray Rocker for reporting this issue.

This update also fixes the following bugs:

  • The autofs init script sometimes timed out waiting for the automount daemon to exit and returned a shutdown failure if the daemon failed to exit in time. To resolve this problem, the amount of time that the init script waits for the daemon has been increased to allow for cases where servers are slow to respond or there are many active mounts. (BZ#585058)

  • Due to an omission when backporting a change, autofs attempted to download the entire LDAP map at startup. This mistake has now been corrected. (BZ#767428)

  • A function to check the validity of a mount location was meant to check only for a small subset of map location errors. A recent modification in error reporting inverted a logic test in this validating function. Consequently, the scope of the test was widened, which caused the automount daemon to report false positive failures. With this update, the faulty logic test has been corrected and false positive failures no longer occur. (BZ#798448)

  • When there were many attempts to access invalid or non-existent keys, the automount daemon used excessive CPU resources. As a consequence, systems sometimes became unresponsive. The code has been improved so that automount checks for invalid keys earlier in the process which has eliminated a significant amount of the processing overhead. (BZ#847101)

  • The auto.master(5) man page did not document the "-t, --timeout" option in the FORMAT options section. This update adds this information to the man page. (BZ#859890)

This update also adds the following enhancement:

  • Previously, it was not possible to configure separate timeout values for individual direct map entries in the autofs master map. This update adds this functionality. (BZ#690404)

All users of autofs are advised to upgrade to this updated package, which contains backported patches to correct these issues and add this enhancement.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously-released errata relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to use the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/articles/11258

Affected Products

ProductVersionArch
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian5ppc
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems5s390x
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation5x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation5i386
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server5x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server5ia64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server5i386
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI5x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI5i386
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop5x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop5i386

Updated Packages

  • autofs-5.0.1-0.rc2.177.el5.ppc.rpm
  • autofs-5.0.1-0.rc2.177.el5.i386.rpm
  • autofs-debuginfo-5.0.1-0.rc2.177.el5.i386.rpm
  • autofs-debuginfo-5.0.1-0.rc2.177.el5.s390x.rpm
  • autofs-debuginfo-5.0.1-0.rc2.177.el5.ppc.rpm
  • autofs-debuginfo-5.0.1-0.rc2.177.el5.x86_64.rpm
  • autofs-5.0.1-0.rc2.177.el5.src.rpm
  • autofs-5.0.1-0.rc2.177.el5.x86_64.rpm
  • autofs-debuginfo-5.0.1-0.rc2.177.el5.ia64.rpm
  • autofs-5.0.1-0.rc2.177.el5.s390x.rpm
  • autofs-5.0.1-0.rc2.177.el5.ia64.rpm

Fixes

CVEs

References

Additional information