Original issue date: December 16, 1993<BR>
Last revised: September 19, 1997<BR>
Added Sun patch information.<BR>
Attached copyright statement

<P>A complete revision history is at the end of this file.

<P>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.

<P><HR>

<P>
<H2>I. Description</H2>

<P>If <I>fsck(8)</I> 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.

<P>
<H2>II. Impact</H2>

<P>This vulnerability allows anyone with physical access to the
system console to gain root access.

<P>
<H2>III. Solution</H2>

<P>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.

<P>If you wish to make the change on your own systems, edit both
/sbin/rcS and /sbin/mountall, changing every occurrence of:

<P><PRE>
     /sbin/sh &lt; /dev/console
</PRE>

<P>to:

<P><PRE>
     /sbin/sulogin &lt; /dev/console
</PRE>

<P>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.

<P>Once these changes are made, sulogin will request the root
password in the event <I>fsck(8)</I> fails, before starting a privileged shell.
The success or failure of sulogin will be logged in /var/adm/sulog.

<P><HR>
The CERT Coordination Center wishes to thank Sun Microsystems, Inc.
for their support in responding to this problem.
<HR>

<P>
<HR>

<P>
<H3>UPDATES</H3>

<P>September 19, 1997:

<P>BUG 1124898 is fixed in Solaris 2.4

<!--#include virtual="/include/footer_nocopyright.html" -->
<P>Copyright 1993 Carnegie Mellon University.</P>

<HR>

Revision History
<PRE>
Sept 19, 1997  Updates - Added Sun patch information.
               Attached copyright statement
</PRE>