An updated xinetd package that fixes one security issue is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having moderate security impact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available from the CVE link in the References section. The xinetd package provides a secure replacement for inetd, the Internet services daemon. xinetd provides access control for all services based on the address of the remote host and/or on time of access, and can prevent denial-of-access attacks. It was found that xinetd ignored the user and group configuration directives for services running under the tcpmux-server service. This flaw could cause the associated services to run as root. If there was a flaw in such a service, a remote attacker could use it to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the root user. Red Hat would like to thank Thomas Swan of FedEx for reporting this issue. All xinetd users are advised to upgrade to this updated package, which contains a backported patch to correct this issue.