Cscope: Insecure creation of temporary files — GLSA 200412-11

Cscope is vulnerable to symlink attacks, potentially allowing a local user to overwrite arbitrary files.

Affected packages

Package 	dev-util/cscope on all architectures
Affected versions 	< 15.5-r2
Unaffected versions 	>= 15.5-r2

Background

Cscope is a developer utility used to browse and manage source code.

Description

Cscope creates temporary files in world-writable directories with predictable names.

Impact

A local attacker could create symbolic links in the temporary files directory, pointing to a valid file somewhere on the filesystem. When Cscope is executed, this would result in the file being overwritten with the rights of the user running the utility, which could be the root user.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All Cscope users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=dev-util/cscope-15.5-r2"

References

    CAN-2004-0996
    BugTraq Advisory