Peter Palfrader discovered that in the Git revision control system, on some architectures files under /usr/share/git-core/templates/ were owned by a non-root user. This allows a user with that uid on the local system to write to these files and possibly escalate their privileges. This issue only affects the DEC Alpha and MIPS architectures. For the old stable distribution , this problem has been fixed in version 1.4.4.4-4+etch2. For the stable distribution , this problem has been fixed in version 1.5.6.5-3+lenny1. For the unstable distribution , this problem has been fixed in version 1.6.2.1-1. We recommend that you upgrade your git-core package.