Some vulnerabilities have been reported in Symantec Altiris Deployment Solution, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to gain escalated privileges, and by malicious people to bypass certain security restrictions, disclose sensitive information, cause a DoS (Denial of Service), and potentially compromise a vulnerable system.

1) An error exists in the DBManager authentication mechanism when processing incoming network packets. This can be exploited to modify the Altiris Database and e.g. add or remove users, or potentially modify scheduled tasks.

2) The Aclient GUI executable is installed with insecure default permissions. This can be exploited to run arbitrary code with elevated privileges by replacing the file.

3) An error exists when using the AClient agent with key-based authentication enabled. This can be exploited to execute arbitrary commands on client systems by impersonating a legitimate server prior to the authentication handshake phase.

4) A race condition error in the file transfer functionality can be exploited to download potentially sensitive files exported by a server and stop the client update process.

NOTE: If encryption is enabled, this vulnerability can only be exploited to impact the client update process.

Solution
Update to version 6.9 SP3 Build 430:
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Provided and/or discovered by
The vendor credits Luke Jennings of MWRInfosecurity.

Changelog
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Original Advisory
Symantec (SYM09-011):
http://www.symantec.com/business/security_response/securityupdates/detail.jsp?fid=security_advisory&pvid=security_advisory&year=2009&suid=20090826_00

Deep Links
Links available to Secunia VIM customers