-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 KDE Security Advisory: plain text password exposure Original Release Date: 2004-12-09 URL: http://www.kde.org/info/security/advisory-20041209-1.txt 0. References http://www.sec-consult.com/index.php?id=118 1. Systems affected: All KDE 3.2.x releases, KDE 3.3.0, KDE 3.3.1 and KDE 3.3.2. 2. Overview: Daniel Fabian notified the KDE security team about a possible privacy issue in KDE. When creating a link to a remote file from various applications including Konqueror, the resulting URL may contain the authentication credentials used to access that remote resource. This includes, but is not limited to browsing SMB ("Samba") shares. Further investigation revealed unnecessary exposure of authentication credentials by the SMB ("Samba") protocol handler. The link reference file, which is a file with the extension ".desktop", is a plain text configuration file that is created with default access permissions, depending on the users' umask this could include world read permission. Usually the URL saved in this .desktop file only contains the password if the user manually entered it this way. The SMB protocol handler however unnecessarily exposes authentication credentials by always including this information in the URL that it generates. The KDE team provides patches which will unconditionally remove the password from the authentication credentials before creating the link reference file and that fix the SMB protocol handler to not unnecessarily include passwords in URLs Authentication credentials can then be stored in KWallet instead. 3. Impact: A user may inadvertly expose passwords provided for SMB shares or other passwords that were entered as part of an URL. 4. Solution: Users should verify that links to remote files do not contain password information by right-clicking the link and selecting the "Properties" option and then selecting the "URL" tab. The KDE 3.3.2 release contains most fixes already, therefore the patch set to apply to KDE 3.3.2 is less than for other KDE versions. Source code patches have been made available which fix these vulnerabilities. Contact your OS vendor / binary package provider for information about how to obtain updated binary packages. 5. Patch: Patches for KDE 3.3.1 are available from ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/security_patches : 501852d12f82aebe7eb73ec5d96c9e6d post-3.3.1-kdebase-smb.diff 5b9c1738f2de3f00533e376eb64c7137 post-3.3.1-kdelibs-khtml.diff f287c900c637af2452c7a554f2df166f post-3.3.1-kdelibs-kio.diff Patch for KDE 3.3.2 is available from ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/security_patches : d3658e90acec6ff140463ed2fd0e7736 post-3.3.2-kdelibs-kio.diff Patches for KDE 3.2.3 are available from ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/security_patches : d080d9acf4d2abc5f91ccec8fc463568 post-3.2.3-kdebase-smb.diff d79d1717b4bc0b3891bacaaf37deade0 post-3.2.3-kdelibs-khtml.diff 94e76ec98cd58ce27cad8f886d241986 post-3.2.3-kdelibs-kio.diff -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.5 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFBt618vsXr+iuy1UoRArYpAJ9WwYla1w0zwLZ5h5aC+loKcsYl2wCcCx0y VXT0cntKNdpheNgZcKGYnug= =bTjQ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----