security/privacy hole in zeitgeist

[Franck Arnaud]

zeitgeist data files don't seem to use the write permissions by default:

user@machine:~/.local/share/zeitgeist$ ls -l
total 7244
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 3776512 2012-02-03 23:47 activity.sqlite
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user 1996800 2011-10-17 03:09 activity.sqlite.bck
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 1623848 2012-02-03 23:47 activity.sqlite-journal

so that any user on the same machine (or with network access to the home drive), including the guest user, will be able to read the highly sensitive private information of everybody else and use it to blackmail the users, or whatever nasty things one could do with private information.

this could be fixed by having the right permissions or even better by making all the privacy-killing features of ubuntu opt in...

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

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[Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)]

This is now fixed in Precise by the following commit:

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~zeitgeist/zeitgeist/bluebird/revision/370

[Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)]

Actually, it doesn't appear to be doing it, at least for me on Precise.

The whole ~/.local/share/zeitgeist directory should probably be 0600.

[Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)]

Whoops, the directory should be 0700, not 0600.