Document ID:57657
Title:Document ID 57657
Synopsis:Security Vulnerability When Using LDAP In Conjunction With RBAC
Update Date:2004-10-18

DescriptionTop
Sun(sm) Alert Notification 1. Impact On systems where Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP, see ldap(1)) is used in conjunction with Role Based Access Control (RBAC, see rbac(5)), unprivileged local users may have the ability to execute certain commands with "superuser" (root) privileges.

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

SPARC Platform

x86 Platform

Notes:

  1. Systems are only impacted when using LDAP in conjunction with RBAC .
  2. Solaris 7 is not affected by this issue.
This configuration can be determined by the RBAC related entries in the "/etc/nsswitch.conf" file, which will contain lines with one or more of the following type of entries:

    auth_attr: ldap files
    prof_attr: ldap files
    user_attr: ldap files                              
3. Symptoms There are no predictable symptoms that would indicate the described issue has been exploited.

Solution SummaryTop
4. Relief/Workaround To work around the described issue, configure the system to use "local" files instead of LDAP for RBAC configuration. RBAC related entries in the "/etc/nsswitch.conf" file should be modified as follows:

    auth_attr: files
    prof_attr: files
    user_attr: files                              
Note: With this workaround, LDAP functionality will be disabled for the RBAC database and all RBAC related data will be queried from "local" files instead of through LDAP.

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

SPARC Platform

x86 Platform

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