Festival is a text-to-speech accessibility program.
Konstantine Shirow reported a vulnerability in default Gentoo configurations of Festival. The daemon is configured to run with root privileges and to listen on localhost, without requiring a password.
A local attacker could gain root privileges by connecting to the daemon and execute arbitrary commands.
Set a password in the configuration file /etc/festival/server.scm by adding the line: (set! server_passwd password)
All Festival users should upgrade to the latest version:
# emerge --sync
# emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=app-accessibility/festival-1.95_beta-r4"