1.2 - DSA-056

Ethan Benson found a bug in man-db packages as distributed in Debian/GNU/Linux 2.2. man-db includes a mandb tool which is used to build an index of the manual pages installed on a system. When the -u or - -c option were given on the command-line to tell it to write its database to a different location it failed to properly drop privileges before creating a temporary file. This makes it possible for an attacked to do a standard symlink attack to trick mandb into overwriting any file that is writable by uid man, which includes the man and mandb binaries.

This has been fixed in version 2.3.16-3, and we recommend that you upgrade your man-db package immediately. If you use suidmanager you can also use that to make sure man and mandb are not installed suid which protects you from this problem. This can be done with the following commands:

suidregister /usr/lib/man-db/man root root 0755 suidregister /usr/lib/man-db/mandb root root 0755

Of course even when using suidmanager an upgrade is still strongly recommended.

wget url will fetch the file for you dpkg -i file.deb will install the referenced file.

Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 alias potato