Secunia

Two vulnerabilities have been identified in KDE allowing malicious users to escalate their privileges or malicious people to brute force the session cookie.

1) KDM may grant a valid users root privileges if configured to use the pam_krb5 module. It is uncertain whether this affects other pam modules. The problem is that KDM doesn't check for succesful completion of "pam_setcred()".

2) The algorithm which generates the 128 bit session cookies is weak, potentially allowing malicious people to brute force the session cookie. This could potentially be exploited by malicious people on the local network to gain system access.

This affects all versions of KDE.

Solution
KDE recommend that users upgrade to version 3.1.4
Further details available in Customer Area

Provided and/or discovered by
Stephan Kulow
George Lebl

Original Advisory
http://www.kde.org/info/security/advisory-20030916-1.txt

Deep Links
Links available in Customer Area