GIMPS: Root privilege escalation

GIMPS: Root privilege escalation Gentoo's GIMPS ebuilds are vulnerable to privilege escalation due to improper permissions. A local attacker could use it to gain root privileges. gimps 2017-09-17 2017-09-17 603408 local 28.10-r1 28.10-r1

GIMPS, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, is a software capable of find Mersenne Primes, which are used in cryptography. GIMPS is also used for hardware testing.

It was discovered that Gentoo’s default GIMPS installation suffered from a privilege escalation vulnerability in the init script. This script calls an unsafe “chown -R” command in checkconfig() function.

A local attacker who does not belong to the root group, but has the ability to modify the /var/lib/gimps directory can escalate privileges to the root group.

There is no known workaround at this time.

All GIMPS users should upgrade to the latest version:


      # emerge --sync
      # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=sci-mathematics/gimps-28.10-r1"

CVE-2017-14484 BlueKnight chrisadr