Cscope: Insecure creation of temporary files

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"