CVE-2019-12749

A flaw was found in dbus. The implementation of DBUS_COOKIE_SHA1 is susceptible to a symbolic link attack. A malicious client with write access to its own home directory could manipulate a ~/.dbus-keyrings symlink to cause the DBusServer to read and write in unintended locations resulting in an authentication bypass. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to data confidentiality and integrity as well as system availability.

This flaw is mitigated by the fact that by default, the well-known system dbus-daemon (since 2003) and the well-known session dbus-daemon (in stable releases since dbus 1.10.0 in 2015) only accept the EXTERNAL authentication mechanism, and as a result will reject DBUS_COOKIE_SHA1 at an early stage, before manipulating cookies.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is affected by this flaw, which can be leveraged to achieve privilege escalation via upstart. This issue has been rated as having important impact for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and 8, both ship dbus >= 1.10 and therefore are affected by this flaw only when system or session dbus-daemons are used under non-standard configurations or by third party users of DBusServer. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and 8 does not ship any affected DBusServer cosumer. However third party applications may be affected.

The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.