(RHSA-2015:1344) Moderate: autofs security and bug fix update

The autofs utility controls the operation of the automount daemon. The
daemon automatically mounts file systems when in use and unmounts them when
they are not busy.

It was found that program-based automounter maps that used interpreted
languages such as Python would use standard environment variables to locate
and load modules of those languages. A local attacker could potentially use
this flaw to escalate their privileges on the system. (CVE-2014-8169)

Note: This issue has been fixed by adding the “AUTOFS_” prefix to the
affected environment variables so that they are not used to subvert the
system. A configuration option (“force_standard_program_map_env”) to
override this prefix and to use the environment variables without the
prefix has been added. In addition, warnings have been added to the manual
page and to the installed configuration file. Now, by default the standard
variables of the program map are provided only with the prefix added to
its name.

Red Hat would like to thank the Georgia Institute of Technology for
reporting this issue.

Bug fixes:

• If the “ls " command was executed before a valid mount, the autofs
  program failed on further mount attempts inside the mount point, whether
  the mount point was valid or not. While attempting to mount, the “ls "
  command of the root directory of an indirect mount was executed, which
  led to an attempt to mount "”, causing it to be added to the negative
  map entry cache. This bug has been fixed by checking for and not adding
  "” while updating the negative map entry cache. (BZ#1163957)

• The autofs program by design did not mount host map entries that were
  duplicate exports in an NFS server export list. The duplicate entries in a
  multi-mount map entry were recognized as a syntax error and autofs refused
  to perform mounts when the duplicate entries occurred. Now, autofs has been
  changed to continue mounting the last seen instance of the duplicate entry
  rather than fail, and to report the problem in the log files to alert the
  system administrator. (BZ#1124083)

• The autofs program did not recognize the yp map type in the master map.
  This was caused by another change in the master map parser to fix a problem
  with detecting the map format associated with mapping the type in the
  master map. The change led to an incorrect length for the type comparison
  of yp maps that resulted in a match operation failure. This bug has been
  fixed by correcting the length which is used for the comparison.
  (BZ#1153130)

• The autofs program did not update the export list of the Sun-format maps
  of the network shares exported from an NFS server. This happened due to a
  change of the Sun-format map parser leading to the hosts map update to stop
  working on the map re-read operation. The bug has been now fixed by
  selectively preventing this type of update only for the Sun-formatted maps.
  The updates of the export list on the Sun-format maps are now visible and
  refreshing of the export list is no longer supported for the Sun-formatted
  hosts map. (BZ#1156387)

• Within changes made for adding of the Sun-format maps, an incorrect check
  was added that caused a segmentation fault in the Sun-format map parser in
  certain circumstances. This has been now fixed by analyzing the intent of
  the incorrect check and changing it in order to properly identify the
  conditions without causing a fault. (BZ#1175671)

• A bug in the autofs program map lookup module caused an incorrect map
  format type comparison. The incorrect comparison affected the Sun-format
  program maps where it led to the unused macro definitions. The bug in the
  comparison has been fixed so that the macro definitions are not present for
  the Sun-format program maps. (BZ#1201195)

Users of autofs are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which
contain backported patches to correct these issues.