National Cyber-Alert System
Vulnerability Summary for CVE-2008-3896
Original release date:09/03/2008
Last revised:01/29/2009
Source:
US-CERT/NIST
Overview
Grub Legacy 0.97 and earlier stores pre-boot authentication passwords in the BIOS Keyboard buffer and does not clear this buffer before and after use, which allows local users to obtain sensitive information by reading the physical memory locations associated with this buffer.
Impact
CVSS Severity (version 2.0):
Impact Subscore:
2.9
Exploitability Subscore:
3.9
CVSS Version 2 Metrics:
Access Vector: Locally exploitable
Access Complexity: Low
Authentication: Not required to exploit
Impact Type:Allows unauthorized disclosure of information
- Official Statement from Red Hat (01/01/1900)
-
Red Hat does not consider this to be a security issue. Since these operations can only be executed by root, no trust boundary is crossed as a result of this behaviour.
References to Advisories, Solutions, and Tools
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External Source: BUGTRAQ
Name: 20080825 [IVIZ-08-009] Grub Legacy Security Model bypass exploiting wrong BIOS API usage
External Source: MISC
Name: http://www.ivizsecurity.com/research/preboot/preboot_whitepaper.pdf
External Source: MISC
Name: http://www.ivizsecurity.com/preboot-patch.html
External Source: SREASON
Name: 4206
External Source: SREASON
Name: 4204