this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
56 points (98.3% liked)

Linux

48310 readers
645 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Exploit of a combination of several bugs - Overhyped but not that severe - Fixes already available

...

Canonical’s security team has acted immediately to quickly apply the patches which Michael Sweet (author and maintainer of CUPS) had already prepared for CUPS, cups-browsed, libcups-filters, libppd, and cups-filters (in the time from the first report until then I was some days off and I was also on the Open Source Summit Europe, thanks, Michael Sweet, for stepping in, also thanks to Zdenek Dohnal from Red Hat) to the appropriate in all supported Ubuntu versions, so that at the time of disclosure most fixes were already in place. They also reported in an Ubuntu blog. They tell users what to do, from turning off cups-browsed or at least its legacy CUPS browsing support to updating their systems as the fixes were already available. Thanks a lot to Seth Arnold, Marc Deslauriers, Diogo Sousa, Mark Esler, Luci Stanescu, and more.

...

The X post really overhyped the vulnerability. Attacks from the internet are not very probable due to the fact that servers on the internet do not have cups-browsed and CUPS installed and CUPS/cups-browsed setups are there usually only in NAT-protected local networks with desktop machines and print servers. And the remote code execution is also rather restricted, as CUPS filters are not running as root, but as the system user “lp” which cannot even read user’s home directories. In addition, the remote code execution only happens when a user actually prints a job on the fake printer. Actually assigned scores ended up between 8.4 and 9.1.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] sweng@programming.dev 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm not sure why you say it's "artificially" inflated. Non-linux systems are also affected.

[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

How's that? If I'm running a Windows machine, how would a CUPS exploit affect me?

I'm not asking maliciously, but I genuinely don't grasp how that could be a viable attack vector.

[–] sweng@programming.dev 2 points 1 month ago

You would be vulnerable on Windows, if you were running CUPS, which you probably are not. But CUPS is not tied to Linux, and is used commonly on e.g. BSDs, and Apple has their own fork for MacOS (have not heard anything about it being vulnerable though).