A weakness and some security issues have been reported in ncpfs, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to disclose system information and potentially sensitive information, cause a DoS (Denial of Service), and potentially gain escalated privileges.

1) Some security issues are caused due to race conditions within the "ncpmount", "ncpumount", and "ncplogin" utilities, which can be exploited to unmount arbitrary mountpoints or mount Netware shares into arbitrary directories.

2) A weakness is caused due to an error within the "ncpumount" utility, which can be exploited to confirm the existence of arbitrary files.

3) A security issue is caused due to the "ncpmount", "ncpumount", and "ncplogin" utilities potentially leaving a stale "/etc/mtab~" lock file, which can be exploited to prevent other mount utilities from operating correctly.

4) The "ncpmount" and "ncpumount" are not properly handling the SIGXFSZ signal when e.g. adding new file system descriptions to "/etc/mtab", which can be exploited to e.g. corrupt the "/etc/mtab" file or leave a stale "/etc/mtab~" file by setting a low RLIMIT_FSIZE limit.

Note: Successful exploitation may require that the affected utilities are suid root.

Solution
Restrict access to trusted users only.

Provided and/or discovered by
Dan Rosenberg

Changelog
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Original Advisory
Dan Rosenberg:
http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclosure/2010-03/0121.html
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2011/03/04/9
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2011/03/15/6

Red Hat:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2009-3297

Deep Links
Links available to Secunia VIM customers