COMMAND
UFS/EXT2FS
SYSTEMS AFFECTED
unices
PROBLEM
Sven Berkvens and Marc Olzheim found following. UFS is the Unix
File System, used by default on FreeBSD systems and many other
UNIX variants. EXT2FS is a filesystem used by default on many
Linux systems, which is also available on FreeBSD.
There exists a data consistency race condition which allows users
to obtain access to areas of the filesystem containing data from
deleted files. The filesystem code is supposed to ensure that
all filesystem blocks are zeroed before becoming available to
user processes, but in a certain specific case this zeroing does
not occur, and unzeroed blocks are passed to the user with their
previous contents intact. Thus, if the block contains data which
used to be part of a file or directory to which the user did not
have access, the operation results in unauthorized access of data.
Unprivileged users may obtain access to data which was part of
deleted files.
SOLUTION
This problem was corrected prior to the forthcoming release of
FreeBSD 4.3. To patch your present system: download the relevant
patch from the below location, and execute the following commands
as root:
# fetch ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/CERT/patches/SA-01:30/fs.patch
# fetch ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/CERT/patches/SA-01:30/fs.patch.asc