1007 : Multiple Unix Vendor rlogin -froot Remote Authentication Bypass
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Views This Week	Views All Time	Added to OSVDB	Last Modified	Modified (since 2008)	Percent Complete
49	2867	over 7 years ago	over 2 years ago	2 times	100%

Timeline

Discovery Date	Disclosure Date	Exploit Publish Date
1994-01-01	1994-05-21	1994-05-21

Time to Exploit
140 days

Keywords

FROOT, APAR IX44254, fruit

Description

The rlogin command of multiple Unix vendor contains a flaw that may allow a remote attacker to bypass authentication settings. The issue is triggered when using the '-froot' parameter, which allows a remote attacker to gain root access on a system without being prompted for a password resulting in a loss of integrity.

Classification

Location: Local / Remote
Attack Type: Input Manipulation
Impact: Loss of Integrity
Solution: Patch / RCS
Exploit: Exploit Public
Disclosure: OSVDB Verified, Discovered in the Wild

Technical

The flaw is a result of the way login parses its arguments as passed by rlogind. The problem is that login parses the command line option -fUSER as -f USER when using the getopt() function with the 'f:' opt string. An unauthenticated user can gain root access through rlogin by simply specifying '-froot' as a remote loginname which will be interpreted by rlogin as '-f root'.

Solution

Contact your vendor for an appropriate patch. It is also possible to correct the flaw by implementing the following workaround: comment out the 'rlogin' line in /etc/inetd.conf and restart the inetd process.

Products

International Business Machines Corporation	AIX	3.1.x
		3.2.x

Unknown Distribution

Linux

Unknown or Unspecified

Silicon Graphics, Inc.

IRIX

Unknown or Unspecified

References

Tools & Filters

	10161

Manual Testing Notes

Credit

Pug - pugarlut.utexas.edu -

CVSSv2 Score

CVSSv2 Base Score = 10.0
Source: nvd.nist.gov | Generated: 2003-12-31 | Disagree?

Blogs

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None found at this time

Comments

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Anonymous - 2008/01/21 15:22:34

This was reported on a very limited Linux Kernel 0.9x distribution and actively exploited at the time. However, no one seems to have documented the exact version or release (Slackware maybe?).

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