A Security Vulnerability Relating to Inter-Process Communication (IPC) May Lead to a Denial of Service (DoS)

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A Security Vulnerability Relating to Inter-Process Communication (IPC) May Lead to a Denial of Service (DoS)

1. Impact

A security vulnerability relating to the Inter-Process Communication (IPC) message queue sub-system may allow a local unprivileged user to block all I/O on a message queue until the system is rebooted. This is a type of Denial of Service (DoS).

2. Contributing Factors

This issue can occur in the following releases:

SPARC Platform

• Solaris 10 with patch 127111-02 through 127111-09 and without patch 127111-10
  

x86 Platform

• Solaris 10 with patch 127112-02 through 127112-09 and without patch 127112-10

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

3. Symptoms

IPC message queue I/O (from the perspective of the application) to one or more message queues will hang. An attempt to ascertain the state of the message queue sub-system with the command

    $ ipcs -qa

will also hang after the command has output its heading to the screen.

For further confirmation that this issue has occurred, a system panic could be forced when the above symptom was being exhibited, and the following command run on the resultant core file:

    # echo "::walk thread_cache |::findstack !grep msg_fnd_neg_snd" |mdb -k unix.0 vmcore.
    000002a10232eff1 msg_fnd_neg_snd+0xd8()

This indicates that the kernel function msg_fnd_neg_snd() was present on one of the thread stack backtraces which is another symptom that this issue has likely occurred.

Notes:

1. Care needs to be taken as to when and how a system panic is forced; utilities such as 'halt -d', 'reboot -d', or kmdb '$<systemdump' may be used for this purpose; however, contact your systems administrator or local support center for advice if you are in any way unsure about how to proceed with this operation.
2. By default, crash dumps are written to "/var/crash/<hostname>". See dumpadm(1M) for further information.

4. Workaround

There is no workaround for this issue. Please see the Resolution section below.

5. Resolution

This issue is addressed in the following releases:

SPARC Platform

• Solaris 10 with patch 127111-10 or later
  

x86 Platform

• Solaris 10 with patch 127112-10 or later

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

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