Major Security Hole In Samsung Linux Drivers

GerbilSoft writes with news of a major security hole in Samsung's proprietary Linux printer drivers. From the Ubuntu Forums: "Just to inform you about a recent post on the French Ubuntu forum about Samsung drivers (sorry, in French). [Google translation here.] It appears that Samsung unified drivers change rights on some parts of the system: After installing the drivers, applications may launch using root rights, without asking any password. What is more, you may be able to kill your system, by deleting system components, generally modifiable only by using sudo." GerbilSoft adds: "Among the programs that it sets as setuid-root are OpenOffice, xsane, and xscanimage."

Comments

Lazy Design...

[Azuma Hazuki]

This sounds like a cheap hack. There is no need for these things to be setuid root, not on the program level. Sounds like someone is used to programming Windows drivers...

I'm tempted to infer something sinister about this, but then I remember the old adage "never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity." It keeps your blood pressure nice and low.

Windows coders

[erroneus]

If I'm not mistaken, this is how Windows got as bad as it is.

This particular incident cannot be protested enough. If this sort of thing becomes common, End-user Linux will become as corrupted as Windows.

Re:to be fair

[Anonymous Coward]

no user is going to be able to install such a dangerous "driver" without root access in the first place-- anyone can build a program, intentionally or accidently, that comprimises a system when ran/installed as root

Yes, but when you install a driver, you normally assume that it's not going to make your system insecure. Why should it? Only a very badly designed driver would deliberately break your system security.

Sometimes drivers do accidentally introduce security problems. The Nvidia drivers for X have done this in the past, for example. In those cases, it's not bad design, it's an oversight of some sort, like a buffer overflow.

But this is not an oversight. A deliberate design decision has been made to break the Linux security model. A very special type of stupidity is involved: one that includes an understanding of the effects of the setuid bit, but excludes an understanding of the security implications.

Samsung should investigate this fully - who knows what other retarded decisions have been made by these guys?

I agree, BUT

[PetriBORG]

I agree with what you said, BUT...

Stop with your lame "thousand eyes" theory. Apparently those thousand eyes couldn't see a permissions change on their own systems. This is uncalled for, because as can be see on the ubuntu forums you can clearly see it was the "thousand eyes" reality that caught this problem in the first place and found the solution to remove parts from the install script.

wrap_setuid_third_party_application xsane
wrap_setuid_third_party_application xscanimage
wrap_setuid_ooo_application soffice
wrap_setuid_ooo_application swriter
wrap_setuid_ooo_application simpress
wrap_setuid_ooo_application scalc
And the content of the function for suid-making functions etc. So I have to disagree with you there.

I also agree with you though that linux distros should be automatically building in some sort of tripwire type setup to protect important system segments from scripts that are like this.