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 format string in the check= field of the .SHELL variable, it is possible to write to an arbitrary memory address of the program. This could result in the overwriting of the return address, and execution 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 format string in the check= field of the .SHELL variable, it is possible to write to an arbitrary memory address of the program. This could result in the overwriting of the return address, and execution of arbitrary code with root privileges.