Date:         Sun, 5 Mar 2000 18:32:06 -0800
From: Keyser Soze <ksoze@OBSCURITY.ORG>
Subject:      Oracle installer problem
To: BUGTRAQ@SECURITYFOCUS.COM

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greetings,

During the installation of Oracle 8.1.5.0.1 for Linux the installer
creates the directory /tmp/orainstall (owned by oracle:dba, mode 711).
Inside that directory it creates a shell script called orainstRoot.sh
(mode 777). After that, the installer stops and asks you to run this
script as root.

There are two big problems here:

1. The installer blindly writes to orainstRoot.sh without checking if it
exists, is a regular file or if it is even owned by oracle. An attacker
may be able to use this to gain access to the oracle account by creating a
.rhosts or .ssh/authorized_keys in oracle's home directory. After that
they could connect to your database as INTERNAL...

2. Any user can run shell commands as root by editing orainstRoot.sh
before root executes it.

I don't recommend installing Oracle on machines with user accounts, but if
you must you can eliminate this problem by creating /tmp/orainstall/
with proper permissions before you run the installer. So, for a typical
installation:

   mkdir /tmp/orainstall
   chmod 700 /tmp/orainstall
   chown oracle:dba /tmp/orainstall

(note: I found this using an 8.1.5i for Linux/Intel CD that Oracle shipped
me last week. The part number is F54997-01.)

ksoze


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