Some vulnerabilities have been reported in Ingres, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to gain escalated privileges.

1) An error exists in the "verifydb" utility due to improperly changing permissions on files and having the setuid-bit set (owned by the "ingres" user). This can be exploited to gain write access to files owned by the Ingres database user via symlink attacks.

This vulnerability affects all platforms except VMS and Windows.

2) A boundary error exists within the "libbecompat" library that is used by several of the setuid "ingres" utilities. This can be exploited to cause a stack-based buffer overflow e.g. via a specially crafted environmental variable.

Successful exploitation allows execution of arbitrary code with privileges of the "ingres" user.

3) An error exists within the "ingvalidpw" utility due to being setuid "root" and loading shared libraries from a directory owned by the "ingres" user. This can be exploited by an "ingres" user to execute arbitrary code with with "root" privileges.

Vulnerabilities #2 and #3 only affect Linux and HP platforms.

The vulnerabilities are reported in Ingres 2006 release 2 (9.1.0), Ingres 2006 release 1 (9.0.4), and Ingres 2.6.

Solution
The vendor has issued fixes. Please see the knowledge base document (customer login required).
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Provided and/or discovered by
An anonymous researcher, reported via iDefense.

Original Advisory
Ingres:
http://www.ingres.com/support/security-alert-080108.php

iDefense:
http://labs.idefense.com/intelligence/vulnerabilities/display.php?id=731
http://labs.idefense.com/intelligence/vulnerabilities/display.php?id=732
http://labs.idefense.com/intelligence/vulnerabilities/display.php?id=733

Deep Links
Links available to Secunia VIM customers