Debian Security Advisory DSA 509-1 (gatos)

The remote host is missing an update to gatos announced via advisory DSA 509-1.

Steve Kemp discovered a vulnerability in xatitv, one of the programs in the gatos package, which is used to display video with certain ATI video cards. xatitv is installed setuid root in order to gain direct access to the video hardware. It normally drops root privileges after successfully initializing itself. However, if initialization fails due to a missing configuration file, root privileges are not dropped, and xatitv executes the system(3) function to launch its configuration program without sanitizing user-supplied environment variables. By exploiting this vulnerability, a local user could gain root privileges if the configuration file does not exist. However, a default configuration file is supplied with the package, and so this vulnerability is not exploitable unless this file is removed by the administrator. For the current stable distribution (woody) this problem has been fixed in version 0.0.5-6woody1. For the unstable distribution (sid), this problem will be fixed soon. We recommend that you update your gatos package.

https://secure1.securityspace.com/smysecure/catid.html?in=DSA%20509-1