A Security Vulnerability in the Solaris Kerberos PAM Module May Allow Use of a User Specified Kerberos Configuration File, Leading to Escalation of Privileges


1. Impact

A security vulnerability in the Solaris Kerberos (see kerberos(5)) pam_krb5(5) PAM module may allow a user supplied Kerberos configuration file to be used to specify realm and KDC server information, thereby allowing certain remote unprivileged users or applications to gain elevated privileges.

Sun acknowledges with thanks, Russ Allbery and Steven Luo for bringing this issue to our attention.

This issue is also described in the following documents:

CVE-2009-0360 at http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2009-0360
CVE-2009-0361 at http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2009-0361

2. Contributing Factors

This issue can occur in the following releases:

SPARC Platform

    * SEAM (Sun Enterprise Authentication Mechanism) 1.0.1 (for Solaris 8)
    * Solaris 9
    * Solaris 10
    * Opensolaris based upon build snv_01 or later

x86 Platform

    * SEAM (Sun Enterprise Authentication Mechanism) 1.0.1 (for Solaris 8)
    * Solaris 9
    * Solaris 10
    * Opensolaris based upon build snv_01 or later

Note: OpenSolaris distributions may include additional bug fixes above and beyond the build from which it was derived. The base build can be derived as follows:

$ uname -v
snv_101 

Note: This issue could affect all systems utilizing Kerberos. To determine if you system is using Kerberos, the following command can be run:

$ svcs -a | grep security

If none of the services are enabled, the system is not using Kerberos.

3. Symptoms

There are no predictable symptoms to indicate this issue has been exploited to gain elevated privileges.

4. Workaround

To work around the described issue, allow only rsh(1), rlogin(1) or ssh(1) to access remote systems.

5. Resolution

A final resolution is pending completion.

For more information on Security Sun Alerts, see Technical Instruction ID 213557.

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