Security Vulnerability in Solaris 10 NFS Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) May Allow a Denial of Service (DoS) or Data Integrity Issues for Non-Global Zones

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Security Vulnerability in Solaris 10 NFS Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs):

1. Impact

A security vulnerability in the NFS Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) zones implementation may allow a local user with administrative privileges in a non-global zone to intercept and corrupt NFS traffic destined for other non-global zones on the system.  This may result in a Denial of Service (DoS) to the NFS services in the affected non-global zones.

Sun acknowledges with thanks, Hewitt Associates for bringing this issue to our attention.

2. Contributing Factors

This issue can occur in the following releases:

SPARC Platform

• Solaris 10 without patch 138070-02
• OpenSolaris based upon builds snv_01 through snv_87

x86 Platform

• Solaris 10 without patch 138071-02
• OpenSolaris based upon builds  snv_01 through snv_87
  

Note 1: Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 are not impacted by this issue.

Note 2:  Non-global zones which use Secure NFS (using either Diffie-Hellman authentication or Kerberos V5 authentication which uses RPCSEC_GSS) are not impacted by this issue.

Note 3: OpenSolaris distributions may include additional bug fixes above and beyond the build from which it was derived.

To determine the base build of  OpenSolaris, the following command can be used:

    $ uname -v
    snv_86

To determine if a system has a Package Repository Update (PRU) installed which addresses this issue, execute the following command:

    $ pkg contents -o name,value -t set | grep 6655251
    com.sun.service.incorporated_changes 6655251

3. Symptoms

If the described issue has been exploited to cause a Denial of Service, RPC requests from inside non-global zones may fail unpexpectedly. Failed RPC requests would cause NFS requests to the NFS server to be retried or to fail.  This would be seen by longer access times for NFS files and/or errors when accessing files shared by NFS. There are no predictable symptoms that would indicate that this issue has been exploited to present incorrect data to NFS clients who make NFS requests to the server.

4. Workaround

To workaround this issue, non-global zones can be configured to use Secure NFS using either Diffie-Hellman authentication or Kerberos V5 authentication which uses RPCSEC_GSS. Consult the following documentation for more information about configuring Kerberos for NFS/RPC:

    http://www.sun.com/blueprints/1001/krb.pdf

5. Resolution

This issue is addressed in the following releases:

SPARC Platform

• Solaris 10 with patch 138070-02 or later
• OpenSolaris based upon builds snv_88 or later

x86 Platform

• Solaris 10 with patch 138071-02 or later
• OpenSolaris based upon builds snv_88 or later
  

For more information on Security Sun Alerts, see Technical Instruction ID 213557.

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