RMGir has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

There's a very nebulously worded security announcement at Security Focus which claims that there's an unspecified temp file handling vulnerability in perl 5.8.3, which "is unlikely to facilitate privilege escalation".

Does anyone know if there's a real problem and have more details, or is it just that "it's possible to write bad temp file handing in perl" (which seems like a given :)) ?

There are a whole spate of "unspecified and vaguely worded temp file vulnerability discovery" warnings that Trustix just posted, so I don't know if they've made a discovery of a new class of errors...

A quick look/search through p5p archives didn't find anything. (Edit: Neither did downloading the mbox files and running a bunch of grepmail searches on recent months...)

(Edit^2: The advisory is also vague, but makes it sound as if it's a script shipped with perl that has the problem. Maybe one of the installation routines?)


Mike
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Re: Insecure temp file handling vulnerability in perl?
by dave_the_m (Monsignor) on Oct 04, 2004 at 12:35 UTC
    Change #22258, which was mostly integrated into 5.8.4, attempted to remove any code from modules and test/install code that insecurely created temporary files under /tmp.

    This was a 'done on general principles' patch rather than addressing any specific vunerability. Ie a chap at openwall.com grepped the perl src code and modules for any reference to '/tmp' and and removed them where possible.

    Dave.

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