Bugtraq: Re: Tempfile vulnerabilities

[dugsong () MONKEY ORG (Dug Song)]

On Sun, 30 Jan 2000, foo wrote:

> This weekend I decided to play around with a couple of network
> management tools on securityfocus.com ... upon review of the source, I
> noticed a bad trend. Both tools handle temporary files insecurely.
the l0pht's tempwatch tool is useful in rooting out such problems.

        http://www.l0pht.com/advisories/watch.txt

(or /usr/ports/security/tempwatch on OpenBSD)...

> - Check for the existence of your temporary file before you do anything
> with it:
>
> $SECUREDIR=/home/blah
> $tmpfile=$SECUREDIR/t.$$
> if [ -e $tmpfile ]; then
>         echo -e "ERROR! : temporary file exists, erasing!\r\n"; rm -rf
> $tmpfile
> fi
you still have an exploitable race here.

a better way around this (esp. for program with many tmp files) is to use
a temporary directory instead, as in OpenBSD's /etc/security script:

umask 077
DIR=/tmp/_secure$$
TMP1=$DIR/_secure2
TMP2=$DIR/_secure3

if ! mkdir $DIR ; then
        printf "tmp directory %s already exists, looks like:\n" $DIR
        ls -alF $DIR
        exit 1
fi

trap 'rm -rf $DIR; exit 1' 0 1 2 3 13 15

or if you're using OpenBSD, use the mktemp(1) program in your scripts:

        http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=mktemp

-d.

---
http://www.monkey.org/~dugsong/