VULHUB ™

Parallel Make (pmake) is a freely available version of the make program, originally distributed with Berkeley Unix. It is designed to execute Makefiles and build programs. pmake is not typically setuid root, although some Linux distributions default to installing it this way. When a Makefile is executed by pmake, certain user-defined variables can be set in the Makefile by the user. One such variable is the shell definition variable, or .SHELL. By supplying a string of greater than 512 characters in the check= field of the .SHELL variable, it is possible to overwrite the return address, and execute of arbitrary code with root privileges.

Parallel Make (pmake) is a freely available version of the make program, originally distributed with Berkeley Unix. It is designed to execute Makefiles and build programs. pmake is not typically setuid root, although some Linux distributions default to installing it this way. When a Makefile is executed by pmake, certain user-defined variables can be set in the Makefile by the user. One such variable is the shell definition variable, or .SHELL. By supplying a string of greater than 512 characters in the check= field of the .SHELL variable, it is possible to overwrite the return address, and execute of arbitrary code with root privileges.