VDE: Privilege escalation

Background

VDE is an ethernet compliant virtual network that can be spawned over a set of physical computer over the Internet.

Description

It was discovered that Gentoo’s default VDE installation suffered from a privilege escalation vulnerability in the init script. This script calls an unsafe ‘chown’ command which gives members from “qemu” group root privileges.

Impact

A local attacker could escalate privileges to root.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All VDE users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=net-misc/vde-2.3.2-r4"