ktsuss: Privilege escalation

Background

ktsuss is a simple, graphical version of su written in C and GTK+.

Description

Two vulnerabilities have been found in ktuss:

• Under specific circumstances, ktsuss skips authentication and fails to change the effective UID back to the real UID (CVE-2011-2921).
• The GTK interface spawned by the ktsuss binary is run as root (CVE-2011-2922).

Impact

A local attacker could gain escalated privileges and use the “GTK_MODULES” environment variable to possibly execute arbitrary code with root privileges.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

Gentoo discontinued support for ktsuss. We recommend that users unmerge ktsuss:

 # emerge --unmerge "x11-misc/ktsuss"