MCollective: Privilege escalation

Background

MCollective is a framework to build server orchestration or parallel job execution systems.

Description

Two vulnerabilities have been found in MCollective:

• An untrusted search path vulnerability exists in MCollective (CVE-2014-3248)
• MCollective does not properly validate server certificates (CVE-2014-3251)

Impact

A local attacker can execute arbitrary a Trojan horse shared library, potentially resulting in arbitrary code execution and privilege escalation. Furthermore, a local attacker may be able to establish unauthorized MCollective connections.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All MCollective users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=app-admin/mcollective-2.5.3"