aRts: Privilege escalation

Background

aRts is a real time modular system for synthesizing audio used by KDE. artswrapper is a helper application used to start the aRts daemon.

Description

artswrapper fails to properly check whether it can drop privileges accordingly if setuid() fails due to a user exceeding assigned resource limits.

Impact

Local attackers could exploit this vulnerability to execute arbitrary code with elevated privileges. Note that the aRts package provided by Gentoo is only vulnerable if the artswrappersuid USE-flag is enabled.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All aRts users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose kde-base/arts