Software Engineering Institute

The Sun Microsystems Solstice AdminSuite is a graphical tool that allows Solaris and SunOS hosts to be administered by a remote host. The daemon portion of the program (sadmind) is a setuid root application that listens for requests from a remote administration client. In its default configuration, sadmind accepts requests using "AUTH_SYS" authentication, which uses plaintext authentication in a format that can be easily manipulated by an attacker. Since sadmind is designed to allow the remote execution of arbitrary commands, an attacker who is able to spoof the authentication portion of a packet can execute commands with little difficulty.

The daemon can be configured to operate securely by specifying a security level of 2, which causes sadmind to require "AUTH_DES" authentication. This capability has existed since at least April 1999, when the sadmind man page was updated for SunOS 5.9. The recommendation to use security level 2 was provided in Sun Security Bulletin #00191 and CERT Advisory CA-1999-16, so it is likely that many Solaris systems have been configured to disable this service. However, the insecure default configuration is still shipped with modern releases of Solaris, so system administrators are encouraged to review their configurations.

Affected systems allow remote users to execute arbitrary commands with the privileges of the sadmind daemon, typically superuser (root).

The CERT/CC is not aware of a permanent solution that addresses this vulnerability.

Configure sadmind to use AUTH_DES authentication

As recommended by Sun Alert 56740, users can take the following steps to enable AUTH_DES authentication:

1. Edit the "/etc/inetd.conf" file and append "-S 2" to the end of the sadmind line as follows:

100232/10 tli rpc/udp wait root /usr/sbin/sadmind sadmind -S 2

2. Tell the inetd(1M) process to reread the newly modified "/etc/inetd.conf" file by sending it a hangup signal, SIGHUP:

# /usr/bin/pkill -HUP inetd

Disable the sadmind daemon

As recommended by Sun Alert 56740, users can take the following steps to disable sadmind:

1. Edit the "/etc/inetd.conf" file and comment out the following line by adding the "#" symbol to the beginning of the line as follows:

#100232/10 tli rpc/udp wait root /usr/sbin/sadmind sadmind

2. Tell the inetd(1M) process to reread the newly modified "/etc/inetd.conf" file by sending it a hangup signal, SIGHUP:

# /usr/bin/pkill -HUP inetd