Vixie cron: Denial of service

Background

Paul Vixie’s cron daemon, a fully featured crond implementation.

Description

Vixie cron contains a race condition relating to atime and mtime values of temporary files.

Impact

A local attacker could change the modification time of files, possibly resulting in a Denial of Service condition via a symlink attack.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All Vixie cron users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=sys-process/vixie-cron-4.1-r14"