A security issue has been reported in Shadow, which potentially can be exploited by malicious, local users to perform certain actions with escalated privileges.

The security issue is cause due to the "mode" flag not being supplied to the "open()" function in useradd.c when creating a user's mailbox file. This causes the mailbox to be created with unpredictable file permissions and may allow malicious users to read or modify the mailbox.

The security issue has been reported in version 4.0.7 and prior.

Solution
Update to version 4.0.8 or later.
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Provided and/or discovered by
Reported by vendor.

Changelog
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Original Advisory
http://cvs.pld.org.pl/shadow/NEWS?rev=1.109
http://cvs.pld.org.pl/shadow/src/useradd.c?r1=1.50&r2=1.51

Other references
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Deep Links
Links available to Secunia VIM customers