A vulnerability has been reported in Sun VirtualBox, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to gain escalated privileges.

The vulnerability is caused due to the VBoxNetAdpCtl configuration tool improperly sanitising arguments before passing them in calls to "popen()". This can be exploited to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges via specially crafted arguments.

Successful exploitation requires permissions to run VirtualBox.

NOTE: An error related to an unsafe "strncpy()" call was also fixed.

The vulnerability is reported in Sun VirtualBox 3.0.0, 3.0.2, 3.0.4 and 3.0.6, for the Solaris x86, Linux, and Mac OS X platforms.

Solution
Update to version 3.0.8.

Provided and/or discovered by
The vendor credits Thomas Biege of SUSE Linux.

Changelog
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Original Advisory
Sun:
http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetkey=1-66-268188-1

VirtualBox:
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog

Other references
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Deep Links
Links available to Secunia VIM customers