Some security issues and a vulnerability have been reported in Lotus Notes for Linux, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to gain escalated privileges or potentially by malicious people to compromise a user's system.

1) Files extracted from the installation kit archive are given world-writable permissions. This can be exploited to modify the installation kit and place malicious content, which is then later executed when the installer is run.

2) An error exists in setup.sh contained within the installation kit when setting permissions for the "installdata" binary. This can be exploited to replace the "installdata" file with a malicious binary, which is then later executed when setup.sh is run.

3) An error in the Lotus Notes client when processing specially-crafted SMTP responses can be exploited to crash the client or execute arbitrary code when a specific attachment is included in an SMTP message.

This is related to vulnerability #5 in:
SA27279

The security issues are reported in version 8.0. Other versions may also be affected.

Solution
Update to version 8.0.1.

Provided and/or discovered by
1, 2) The vendor credits Linux Magazine.
3) The vendor credits Dan Ritter and the VCC.

Changelog
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Original Advisory
Linux Magazine:
http://www.linux-magazine.com/online/news/notes_client_for_linux_insecure_installation_routine

IBM:
http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21289273
http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21271957

Other references
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Deep Links
Links available to Secunia VIM customers