master key should *not* be provided on command line

[Jamin W. Collins]

Binary package hint: ekeyd

From the ekey-rekey man page:

SYNOPSIS
       ekey-rekey [ -d DeviceNode ] SerialNumber MasterKey

However, the "MasterKey" is a critical secret for this device and should never be disclosed. Providing it on the command line means it's potentially available in the process listing to other users of the system.

Furthermore, the above command needs to be run as root (normal users don't have sufficient rights). On Ubuntu this will normally be done via sudo. Any command executed with sudo is written to the system's log files. Thus, the "MasterKey" will quite likely be written to the system's log files. This is highly undesirable.

It would be far better for the "MasterKey" to be read from stdin or some other means than requiring that it be provided on the command line.

As this has the potential to disclose the "MasterKey" I'm tempted to classify this as a security issue. However, I'll leave that decision to others.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: ekeyd 1.1.1-1ubuntu1
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-020635rc4-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Aug 27 11:14:55 2010
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release amd64 (20091027)
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: ekeyd

[Jamin W. Collins (jcollins)]

I just verified that even without running the command directly through sudo, but first switching to root (via "sudo su"), results in the "MasterKey" being written to root's ~/.bash_history since it is provided on the command line.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.