Title: Solaris Xsun HOME Buffer Overflow Vulnerability
Severity: MODERATE
Description:
The X11 server that ships with Sun Microsystems' Solaris contains a locally exploitable buffer overflow condition.
The overflow is due to unsafe copy operations involving the HOME environment variable. The HOME environment variable is used to store the path of the current users' home directory. Because it is an environment variable, users can set the value of HOME to an arbitrary string. Any string copy operations involving user-supplied environment variables must be bounded, or else buffer overruns may be possible.
Unfortunately there are unsafe string copy operations in Xsun involving the value of the HOME environment variable. If an attacker creates a value of HOME that exceeds 1050 bytes, a stack frame within Xsun can be overwritten with the excess data once the offending copy occurs. This can be exploited in typical stack overflow manner to execute arbitrary code with the enhanced privileges of the process.
Any attacker to exploit this vulnerability successfully will gain effective groupid 'root' privileges.
Affected Products:
- Avaya CMS Server 9.0.0
- Sun Solaris 2.3.0
- Sun Solaris 2.4.0
- Sun Solaris 2.5.0
- Sun Solaris 2.5.1
- Sun Solaris 2.6
- Sun Solaris 7.0
- Sun Solaris 7.0_x86
- Sun Solaris 8
- Sun Solaris 8_x86
References:
- Sun Microsystems: Sun Alert ID: 26359
- Sun Microsystems: Sunsolve Online(tm)
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