A Security Vulnerability in Floating Point Context Switch Implementation May Result in a Denial of Service (DoS) or Data Integrity Issues

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A Security Vulnerability in Floating Point Context Switch Implementation May Result in a Denial of Service (DoS) or Data Integrity Issues

1. Impact

There are four issues that may occur with this Bug:

1.  A security vulnerability in the Solaris floating point context switch implementation may allow a local unprivileged user to cause an arbitrary application running on the system to exit, resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS) to that application. It is not possible to target a particular application on the system to terminate.

2. An application executing floating point operations on the system may get incorrect results due to data corruption.

3.  An application, on invoking signal handlers under certain conditions, may cause an arbitrary application running on the system to get incorrect results leading to data integrity issues. It is not possible to target a particular application to lead to incorrect results.

4. An application on Solaris 10 using libc(3LIB) functions memcpy(3C) or memset(3C) or memmove(3C) may get incorrect results, leading to data integrity issues.

2. Contributing Factors

These issues can occur in the following releases:

x86 Platform

• Solaris 9 without patch 122301-23
• Solaris 10 without patch 127112-10

Notes:

1. Solaris on the SPARC platform is not impacted by these issues.
2. Solaris 8 on the x86 platform is not impacted by these issues.
3. Solaris 9 on the x86 platform is not impacted by issue 4 mentioned above.
4. Issues 1 and 2 may be seen only on systems that execute floating point operations.
5. Issues 3 and 4 may also be seen on systems that do not execute any floating point operation.
   

3. Symptoms

The program executing floating point operation exits and dumps an application core due to an unexpected SIGFPE. Otherwise, there will be no symptom other than incorrect operation of an application.

4. Workaround

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

5. Resolution

These issues are addressed in the following releases:

x86 Platform

• Solaris 9 with patch 122301-23 or later
  
• Solaris 10 with patch 127112-10 or later

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

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