BEAST: Denial of service

Background

BEdevilled Audio SysTem is an audio compositor, supporting a wide range of audio formats.

Description

BEAST, which is installed as setuid root, fails to properly check whether it can drop privileges accordingly if seteuid() fails due to a user exceeding assigned resource limits.

Impact

A local user could exceed his resource limit in order to prevent the seteuid() call from succeeding. This may lead BEAST to keep running with root privileges. Then, the local user could use the “save as” dialog box to overwrite any file on the vulnerable system, potentially leading to a Denial of Service.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All BEAST users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=media-sound/beast-0.7.1"