The problem reported for Mathematica is present still at version 10.0.0 for the GUI interface (the command-line interface may be "safe"). Cheers, Paul Szabo psz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/psz/ School of Mathematics and Statistics University of Sydney Australia --- http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2010/May/176 http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2012/Apr/157 http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2013/Feb/31 http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/511298 http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/522354 http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/525613 http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/40169 Paraphrasing what I wrote on 14 May 2010: "The world's definitive system for modern technical computing" http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/ Mathematica on Linux uses the /tmp/MathLink directory in insecure ways. Mathematica creates or re-uses an existing /tmp/MathLink directory, and overwrites files within and follows symlinks. This type of behaviour is "known unsafe" on multi-user machines e.g. University login servers. As a classic example of a symlink attack, while a "victim" is running Mathematica, if an "attacker" uses: cd /tmp/MathLink; for x in *; do rm $x; ln -s /home/victim/.bashrc $x; done then the victim's ~/.bashrc will be clobbered and permissions changed to wide-open, allowing a complete compromise of the account. (If root ever uses Mathematica then the damage is greater.) There is no workaround. - The command-line math interface may be safe. Notified support@xxxxxxxxxxx on 7 May 2010, was assigned [TS 16194].
