Note: This is an archival copy of Security Sun Alert 200182 as previously published on http://sunsolve.sun.com.
Latest version of this security advisory is available from http://support.oracle.com as Sun Alert 1000136.1.
Article ID : 1000136.1
Article Type : Sun Alerts (SURE)
Last reviewed : 2007-11-28
Audience : PUBLIC
Copyright Notice: Copyright © 2010, Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates.

A Security Vulnerability Resulting From Solaris 10 fcp(7D) and devfs(7FS) Interaction May Allow Certain File Operations to Cause a System Hang



Category
Security

Release Phase
Resolved

Product
Solaris 10 Operating System

Bug Id
6526639

Date of Resolved Release
29-NOV-2007

Impact

A security vulnerability with Fibre Channel Protocol driver (fcp(7D)) and Devices File System (devfs(7FS)) in Solaris 10 may allow a local unprivileged user to cause commands such as cfgadm(1M) or format(1M) to hang when run, or cause the system as a whole to hang. This is a type of denial of service (DoS) to the system.

Note: This issue may also occur accidentally and not as a result of a Denial of Service attempt.


Contributing Factors

This issue can occur in the following releases:

SPARC Platform

  • Solaris 10 without patch 128491-01

x86 Platform

  • Solaris 10 without patch 128492-01

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

Note 2: This issue is due to a race condition between the Fibre Channel protocol driver (fcp(7D)) and the devfs(7FS) file system. When Solaris 10 first shipped, this condition was very unlikely to be seen and no occurrences were reported. However, the fibre channel device driver patch 119130-25 for SPARC systems and patch 119131-25 for x86 systems, introduces a retry mechanism in the driver which makes this issue more likely to occur.

A system is only vulnerable to this issue if it is using fibre-channel attached storage which is managed by Sun's SAN Foundation Software (SFS) fibre channel stack using the fp(7d) driver.

To determine if the fp(7d) driver is being used to manage fibre-channel attached storage, the following command can be used:

    $ egrep "/fp@.*/" /etc/path_to_inst|head -1
    "/pci@8,600000/SUNW,qlc@2/fp@0,0/ssd@w2100002037f3fbe1,0" 3 "ssd"
                              \_ fp driver is present in the device path

If no output is produced from the above command, the system is not vulnerable to this issue.


Symptoms

If the described issue occurs, commands such as cfgadm(1M) and format(1M) may hang indefinitely and attempts to kill them will fail. Alternatively, the system may completely hang.


Workaround

There is no workaround for this issue.


Resolution

This issue is addressed in the following releases:

SPARC Platform

  • Solaris 10 with patch 128491-01 or later

x86 Platform

  • Solaris 10 with patch 128492-01 or later


References

128491-01
128492-01




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