-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- __________________________________________________________ The U.S. Department of Energy Computer Incident Advisory Capability ___ __ __ _ ___ / | /_\ / \___ __|__ / \ \___ __________________________________________________________ INFORMATION BULLETIN SunOS LC_MESSAGES Environment Variable Vulnerability September 24, 1999 23:00 GMT Number J-069 ______________________________________________________________________________ PROBLEM: A buffer overflow vulnerability has been identified in the LC_MESSAGES Environment variable. PLATFORM: SunOS 5.7, 5.7_x86, 5.6, 5.6_x86. DAMAGE: A buffer overflow may be exploited to gain root access. SOLUTION: Apply the available patches. ______________________________________________________________________________ VULNERABILITY The risk is HIGH. Buffer overflow attacks are common and easy ASSESSMENT: to execute. We are currently seeing numerous attacks on the rpc.*** binaries (rpc.cmsd, rpc.ttdb) which depend on this variable. ______________________________________________________________________________ [ Start Sun Microsystems Advisory ] ______________________________________________________________________________ Sun Microsystems, Inc. Security Bulletin Bulletin Number: #00189 Date: September 8, 1999 Cross-Ref: Title: LC_MESSAGES ______________________________________________________________________________ The information contained in this Security Bulletin is provided "AS IS." Sun makes no warranties of any kind whatsoever with respect to the information contained in this Security Bulletin. ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED CONDITIONS, REPRESENTATIONS AND WARRANTIES, INCLUDING ANY WARRANTY OF NON-INFRINGEMENT OR IMPLIED WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, ARE HEREBY DISCLAIMED AND EXCLUDED TO THE EXTENT ALLOWED BY APPLICABLE LAW. IN NO EVENT WILL SUN MICROSYSTEMS, INC. BE LIABLE FOR ANY LOST REVENUE, PROFIT OR DATA, OR FOR DIRECT, SPECIAL, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, INCIDENTAL OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES HOWEVER CAUSED AND REGARDLESS OF ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF OR INABILITY TO USE THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS SECURITY BULLETIN, EVEN IF SUN MICROSYSTEMS, INC. HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. If any of the above provisions are held to be in violation of applicable law, void, or unenforceable in any jurisdiction, then such provisions are waived to the extent necessary for this disclaimer to be otherwise enforceable in such jurisdiction. ______________________________________________________________________________ 1. Bulletin Topics Sun announces the release of patches for Solaris(tm) 7 and 2.6 (SunOS(tm) 5.7 and 5.6) which relate to a buffer overflow vulnerability involving the LC_MESSAGES environment variable. Sun recommends that you install the patches listed in section 4 immediately on systems running SunOS 5.7 and 5.6. 2. Who is Affected Vulnerable: SunOS 5.7, 5.7_x86, 5.6, 5.6_x86. Not vulnerable: All other supported versions of SunOS. 3. Understanding the Vulnerability In libc, the LC_MESSAGES environment variable affects the behavior of messaging functions. A vulnerability exists where a buffer overflow could be exploited to gain root access. The patches listed in this bulletin address both libc and the ufsrestore and rcp binaries which are statically linked against libc. 4. List of Patches The following patches are available in relation to the above problem. SunOS version Patch ID _____________ _________ 5.7 106541-07 5.7 ufsrestore 106793-03 5.7 rcp 107972-01 5.7_x86 106542-07 5.7_x86 ufsrestore 106794-03 5.7_x86 rcp 107973-01 5.6 105210-24 5.6 ufsrestore 105722-03 5.6 rcp 107991-01 5.6_x86 105211-22 5.6_x86 ufsrestore 105723-03 5.6_x86 rcp 107992-01 ___________________________________________________________________________ APPENDICES A. Patches listed in this bulletin are available to all Sun customers at: http://sunsolve.sun.com/pub-cgi/show.pl?target=patches/patch- license&nav=pub-patches B. Checksums for the patches listed in this bulletin are available at: ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/CHECKSUMS C. Sun security bulletins are available at: http://sunsolve.sun.com/pub-cgi/secBulletin.pl D. Sun Security Coordination Team's PGP key is available at: http://sunsolve.sun.com/pgpkey.txt E. 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This Security Bulletin may be reproduced and distributed, provided that this Security Bulletin is not modified in any way and is attributed to Sun Microsystems, Inc. and provided that such reproduction and distribution is performed for non-commercial purposes. [ End Sun Microsystems Advisory ] ______________________________________________________________________________ CIAC wishes to acknowledge the contributions of Sun Microsystems for the information contained in this bulletin. ______________________________________________________________________________ CIAC, the Computer Incident Advisory Capability, is the computer security incident response team for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the emergency backup response team for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). CIAC is located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. 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LAST 10 CIAC BULLETINS ISSUED (Previous bulletins available from CIAC) J-059: IBM AIX (pdnsd) Buffer Overflow Vulnerability J-060: Microsoft Office "ODBC" Vulnerabilities J-061: Lotus Notes Domino Server Denial of Service Attacks J-062: Netscape Enterprise and FastTrack Web Servers Buffer Overflow J-063: Domain Name System (DNS) Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks J-064: ActiveX Controls, Scriptlet.typlib & Eyedog, Vulnerabilities J-065: Wu-ftpd Vulnerability J-066: FreeBSD File Flags and Man-In-The-Middle Attack J-067: Profiling Across FreeBSD Exec Calls J-068: FreeBSD Vulnerabilities in wu-ftpd and proftpd -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 4.0 Business Edition iQCVAwUBN/D3A7nzJzdsy3QZAQGqGgQAu5Q6HwsShl02tLEUmBcAefO42L5Tb9T4 mrJ9YWtLMItmSO2eu/lS6Uj/xDshg24WKXe1RdBQPmbPhcJTZEFm1AQxDwzMGeGR pXwd9BrWJFyMn86y0/Z6YWc4kDtRmtORNory/lfbWRw/8HSCQ6AJQs1aZ999MSki heihTPEd5EY= =7qFf -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----