Document Audience:PUBLIC
Document ID:57675
Title:Document ID 57675
Synopsis:Security Vulnerability in ping(1M)
Update Date:2004-11-30
DescriptionTop
Sun(sm) Alert Notification 1. Impact There is a potential buffer overflow in ping(1M) which could result in a local unprivileged user gaining elevated privileges.

2. Contributing Factors This issue can occur in the following releases:

SPARC Platform

x86 Platform

3. Symptoms There are no predictable symptoms that would show the described issue has been exploited.

Solution SummaryTop
4. Relief/Workaround To reduce the chances of the described issue from occurring, apply one of the following workarounds:

1. Remove the "set-user-ID" bit from the ping(1M) binary by issuing the following command: 

    # chmod u-s /usr/sbin/ping
Note: Removing the "set-user-ID" bit from the ping(1M) utility will prevent unprivileged users from using the ping(1M) command.

2. Enable non-executable program stacks by adding the following lines to the "/etc/system" file and reboot the system: 

    set noexec_user_stack = 1
    set noexec_user_stack_log = 1
The above tunable parameters are described in the Solaris Tunable Parameters Reference Manual at: http://docs.sun.com.

Note: Although enabling non-executable user stacks makes the likelihood of a successful exploit much smaller, it does not provide 100 percent against exploitation of this vulnerability.

This workaround is only effective on sun4u, sun4m, and sun4d architectures (enter "uname -m" to display a systems architecture). This workaround will not work on x86 platforms.

5. Resolution This issue is addressed in the following releases:

SPARC Platform

x86 Platform

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