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Solaris FTP Core Dump Shadow Password Recovery Vulnerability

Solaris is the variant of the UNIX Operating System distributed by Sun Microsystems. Solaris is designed as a scalable operating system for the Intel x86 and Sun Sparc platforms, and operates on machines varying from desktop to enterprise server.

A problem in the ftp server included with the Solaris Operating System could allow a local user to recover parts of the shadow file, containing encrypted passwords. Due to a previously known problem involving a buffer overflow in glob(), it is possible to cause a buffer overflow in the Solaris ftp server, which will dump parts of the shadow file to core. This can be done with the CWD ~ command, using a non-standard ftp client.

Therefore, a local user could cause a buffer overflow in the ftp server, and upon reading the core file, recover passwords for other local users, potentially gaining elevated privileges.