[ SOURCE: http://www.secureroot.com/security/advisories/9772842093.html ] Solaris 2.7/2.8 catman temp file vulnerability. Larry W. Cashdollar Vapid Labs Date Published: 12/18/2000 Advisory ID: 11242000-02 Risk: Low Title: catman temp file vulnerability. Class: insecure temp file handling. Remotely Exploitable: no Locally Exploitable: Yes Vulnerability Description: Through the use of symlinking temporary files created by /usr/bin/catman upon execution by root a local user can clobber root owned files. Vulnerable Packages/Systems: Solaris 2.x Sparc/x86 Solution/Vendor Information/Workaround: The vendor is currently working on releasing a patch. See references section for Vendor contact information. Sun BugID: 4392144 Vendor notified on: 11/23/2000 Credits: I alerted sun to this issue 11/23/2000 they responded 11/24/2000. Kudos to the Sun Engineering group. This response time should be a model to other vendors. Technical Description: The catman command creates preformatted versions of the online manual. It also creates the windex database for utilities like apropos and whatis. The problem lies with catman creating a temporary file in /tmp, the file has the form of /tmp/sman_pidofcatman. An attacker can monitor the process list for the execution of catman and create a symlink to a root owned file. catman will upon execution overwrite the contents of that file. This is a new bug for catman and is not addressed in the current patch cluster for Solaris 2.7 Sparc. Exploit/Concept Code: see attachments. References: Sun Microsystems. http://www.sun.com Vapid Labs. http://vapid.betteros.org Email: Larry W. Cashdollar DISCLAIMER: The contents of this advisory are copyright (c) 2000 Larry W. Cashdollar and may be distributed freely provided that no fee is charged for this distribution and proper credit is given. Ver 2.4 11/29/2000