Software Engineering Institute

Kerberos is a network authentication system that uses a trusted third party to authenticate clients and servers to each other. It is designed to provide strong authentication for client/server applications by using secret-key cryptography. MIT Kerberos code is used in network applications from a variety of different vendors and is included in many UNIX and Linux distributions. The kadmind daemon is the administration server that runs on the master Kerberos server.

From the kadmind manual page:

This command starts the KADM5 administration server. The administration server runs on the master Kerberos server, which stores the KDC principal database and the KADM5 policy database. Kadmind accepts remote requests to administer the information in these databases. Remote requests are sent, for example, by kadmin(8) and the kpasswd(1) command, both of which are clients of kadmind.

Per MITKRB5-SA-2007-006 there is a privilege execution vulnerability in kadmind that may allow an authenticated user with modify policy privileges to execute arbitrary code. Note that per MITKRB5-SA-2007-006, versions of kerberos prior to krb5-1.5 are not affected by this vulnerability.

A local attacker, who has modify policy privileges, may be able to execute arbitrary code with elevated privileges

Update
The Kerberos team has released an update to address this issue. Please see MITKRB5-SA-2007-006 for more information on obtaining fixed software.