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- CA-93:19 CERT Advisory
- December 16, 1993
- Solaris System Startup Vulnerability
- - -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
- The CERT Coordination Center has received information concerning a
- vulnerability in the system startup scripts on Solaris 2.x and Solaris x86
- systems. The changes described below will be integrated into the upcoming
- Solaris release.
-
- - -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
- I. Description
-
- If fsck(8) fails during system boot, a privileged shell is run
- on the system console. This behavior can represent a security
- vulnerability if users, who would normally not have root access,
- have physical access to the console at boot time. An attacker
- can force the failure to occur.
-
- II. Impact
-
- This vulnerability allows anyone with physical access to the
- system console to gain root access.
-
- III. Solution
-
- A simple change to each of two system scripts can be used to
- close this potential security hole. The new behavior will cause the
- system to run the privileged shell only if the user at the console
- enters the correct root password.
-
- If you wish to make the change on your own systems, edit both
- /sbin/rcS and /sbin/mountall, changing every occurrence of:
-
- /sbin/sh < /dev/console
- to:
- /sbin/sulogin < /dev/console
-
- As distributed by Sun, /sbin/rcS contains one occurrence of this
- string, at line 152; and /sbin/mountall contains two, one at line
- 66 and one at line 250.
-
- Once these changes are made, sulogin will request the root
- password in the event fsck(8) fails, before starting a privileged shell.
- The success or failure of sulogin will be logged in /var/adm/sulog.
-
- - ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
- The CERT Coordination Center wishes to thank Sun Microsystems, Inc.
- for their support in responding to this problem.
- - ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
- If you believe that your system has been compromised, contact the CERT
- Coordination Center or your representative in Forum of Incident
- Response and Security Teams (FIRST).
-
- Internet E-mail: cert@cert.org
- Telephone: 412-268-7090 (24-hour hotline)
- CERT personnel answer 8:30 a.m.-5:00 p.m. EST(GMT-5)/EDT(GMT-4),
- and are on call for emergencies during other hours.
-
- CERT Coordination Center
- Software Engineering Institute
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890
-
- Past advisories, information about FIRST representatives, and other
- information related to computer security are available for anonymous
- FTP from info.cert.org.
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