Multiple security issues and two vulnerabilities have been reported in Puppet, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to disclose potentially sensitive information and perform certain actions with escalated privileges and by malicious users to cause a DoS (Denial of Service).

1) An error due to the application creating a temporary file in an insecure manner when installing Mac OS X packages from remote sources can be exploited to e.g. overwrite arbitrary files or install an arbitrary package via symlink attacks.

2) An error when handling REST requests for a file from a remote filebucket can be exploited to change the defined location for filebucket storage and thus read files from the user account running the puppet master via symlink attacks.

Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires an authorized SSL key.

3) An error when handling a marshalled Puppet::FileBucket::File object can be exploited to exhaust system resources via specially crafted REST requests.

4) An error when handling file bucket requests can be exploited to execute certain shell commands by requesting an existing file containing executable commands within its path.

Successful exploitation of vulnerability #3 and #4 requires agent SSL keys.

5) An error due to the application creating an output log for NET::Telnet connections in an insecure manner can be exploited to e.g. overwrite arbitrary files via symlink attacks.

Please see the vendor's advisories for a list of affected versions.

Solution
Update to a fixed version or apply hotfixes (please see the vendor's advisories for details).

Provided and/or discovered by
Reported by the vendor

Original Advisory
http://puppetlabs.com/security/cve/cve-2012-1906/
http://puppetlabs.com/security/cve/cve-2012-1986/
http://puppetlabs.com/security/cve/cve-2012-1987/
http://puppetlabs.com/security/cve/cve-2012-1988/
http://puppetlabs.com/security/cve/cve-2012-1989/

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