This advisory describes a vulnerability that affects Cisco products and applications that are installed on the Solaris operating system, and is based on the vulnerability of an common service within the Solaris operating system, not due to a defect of the Cisco product or application. A vulnerability in the "cachefs" program was discovered that enables an attacker to execute arbitrary code under Solaris OS. This vulnerability was publicly announced in the CERT Advisory CA-2002-11. All Cisco products and applications that are installed on Solaris OS are considered vulnerable to the underlying operating system vulnerability, unless the workaround was applied. This vulnerability is described in details in Sun(sm) Alert Notification at http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetkey=1-26-44309-1 . No other Cisco product is vulnerable. Sun is working on a patch. Until the patch is released all affected customers are advised to apply the workaround described in the workaround section. This advisory is available at http://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20020724-solaris-cachefs.
This advisory describes a vulnerability that affects Cisco products and
applications that are installed on the Solaris operating system, and is based
on the vulnerability of an common service within the Solaris operating system,
not due to a defect of the Cisco product or application. A vulnerability in the
"cachefs" program was discovered that enables an attacker to execute arbitrary
code under Solaris OS. This vulnerability was publicly announced in the CERT
Advisory CA-2002-11. All Cisco products and applications that are installed on
Solaris OS are considered vulnerable to the underlying operating system
vulnerability, unless the workaround was applied. This vulnerability is
described in details in Sun(sm) Alert Notification at
http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetkey=1-26-44309-1
.
No other Cisco product is vulnerable.
Sun is working on a patch. Until the patch is released all affected customers are advised to apply the workaround described in the workaround section.
This advisory is available at http://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20020724-solaris-cachefs.
This section provides details on affected products.
All products that are based on the following Solaris releases are affected:
The following products are affected:
The following products are not affected:
No other Cisco products are currently known to be affected by these vulnerabilities.
This vulnerability is described in the following advisories/notifications:
.
.
). A remotely exploitable heap overflow exists in the cachefsd program. It is installed by default on the Sun Solaris OS. Cachefsd caches requests for operations on remote file systems mounted via the use of NFS protocol. An attacker can send a crafted RPC request to the cachefsd program to exploit the vulnerability.
According to Sun Microsystems, failed attempts to exploit this vulnerability may leave a core dump file in the root directory. Note that the core file may be created by some other process and that its presence is not a certain sign of a compromise. Additionally, if the file /etc/cachefstab exists, it may contain entries other than a known cache directories (e.g., /cachefs/cache0).
The workaround is applicable to all Cisco products mentioned in the advisory. For MGC and related products, if you have applied the script from CSCO013.pkg you are protected and you do not have to apply this workaround.
Comment out cachefsd in /etc/inetd.conf as shown below:
#100235/1 tli rpc/tcp wait root /usr/lib/fs/cachefs/cachefsd cachefsd
#100235/1 stream rpc/tcp wait root /usr/lib/fs/cachefs/cachefsd cachefsd
Once the line is commented out either:
Solaris 7 and 8 do the following:$ kill -HUP$ kill
Vulmon
$ pkill -HUP inetd
$ pkill cachefsd
Sun Microsystem is working on a patch. Their latest status on this
vulnerability is available at
http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetkey=1-26-44309-1
.
According to CERT/CC the exploit program for this vulnerability is publicly available and there are credible reports that this vulnerability is actively being exploited.
To learn about Cisco security vulnerability disclosure policies and publications, see the Security Vulnerability Policy. This document also contains instructions for obtaining fixed software and receiving security vulnerability information from Cisco.
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Revision 1.1 |
2002-July-25 |
Update to Details section |
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Revision 1.0 |
2002-July-24 |
Initial public release |
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