awstats vulnerability

Releases

• Ubuntu 6.06
• Ubuntu 5.10
• Ubuntu 5.04

Details

Hendrik Weimer discovered a privilege escalation vulnerability in
awstats. By supplying the ‘configdir’ CGI parameter and setting it to
an attacker-controlled directory (such as an FTP account, /tmp, or
similar), an attacker could execute arbitrary shell commands with the
privileges of the web server (user ‘www-data’).

This update disables the ‘configdir’ parameter by default. If all
local user accounts can be trusted, it can be reenabled by running
awstats with the AWSTATS_ENABLE_CONFIG_DIR environment variable set to
a nonempty value.