Good morning,
When fwsnort was run as a non-root user, it opened the fwsnort.conf file
from the current working directory if a configuration file was not
explicitly specified. The configuration file can specify a directory to
load libraries from, so this would have been an issue if running fwsnort
in an attacker-controlled directory.
Michael Rash has released fwsnort-1.6.4 to fix this issue:
http://www.cipherdyne.org/fwsnort/download/
https://github.com/mrash/fwsnort/blob/master/ChangeLog
The patch (with further issue details) for CVE-2014-0039 is:
https://github.com/mrash/fwsnort/commit/fa977453120cc48e1654f373311f9cac468d3348
For the affected versions, I had only tested 1.6.3 (on Fedora and EPEL).
Cheers,
--
Murray McAllister / Red Hat Security Response Team