openMosixview: Insecure temporary file creation

Background

The openMosixview package contains several tools used to manage openMosix clusters, including openMosixview (the main monitoring and administration application) and openMosixcollector (a daemon collecting cluster and node information).

Description

Gangstuck and Psirac from Rexotec discovered that openMosixview insecurely creates several temporary files with predictable filenames.

Impact

A local attacker could create symbolic links in the temporary files directory, pointing to a valid file somewhere on the filesystem. When openMosixView or the openMosixcollector daemon runs, 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 openMosixview users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=sys-cluster/openmosixview-1.5-r1"