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Solaris Telnet 0-day vulnerability
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Feb 12, 2007 08:40 AM
from the frantically-trying-to-fix dept.
from the frantically-trying-to-fix dept.
philos writes "According to SANS ISC, there's a vulnerability in Solaris 10 and 11 telnet that allows anyone to remotely connect as any account, including root, without authentication. Remote access can be gained with nothing more than a telnet client. More information and a Snort signature can be found at riosec.com. Worse, this is almost identical to a bug in AIX and Linux rlogin from way back in 1994."
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Worm Exploiting Solaris Telnetd Vulnerability 164 comments
MichaelSmith writes "Several news sites are reporting that a worm is starting to exploit the Solaris Telnet 0-day vulnerability. By adding simple text to the Telnet command, the system will skip asking for a username and password. If the systems are installed out of the box, they automatically come Telnet-enabled. 'The SANS Internet Storm Center, which monitors Internet threats, has noticed some increase in activity on the network port used by Solaris' telnet feature, according to an ISC blog posted on Tuesday. "One hopes that there aren't that many publicly reachable Solaris systems running telnet," ISC staffer Joel Esler wrote.'"
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Solaris Telnet 0-day vulnerability
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Why is this a big deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.t-swat.com/)
Re:Why is this a big deal? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Why is this a big deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://2130706433/ | Last Journal: Thursday July 19, @10:29AM)
Can you get the OS vendor to jump and have a man there within 30 minutes to fix it if a supported OS function doesn't work? Yes. Can you get the OS vendor to jump and have a man there within 30 minutes if OpenSSH doesn't work? No. Sometimes it's as simple as that, unfortunately.
That said, don't think that I believe telnet is a good substitute for ssh, but often, and especially in a turtled environment (hard on the outside, soft on the inside) where five nines are more important than internal security, it may still be a better choice, at least until all the OS vendors provide fully supported (and compatible!) versions of SSH.
Re:Why is this a big deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday November 09, @05:49PM)
The OP is right, he knows his risks and has deemed it acceptable. You and others, having no idea of the risk, deem it unacceptable and are the ignorant ones.
Re:Why is this a big deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://cafepress.com/phototravel?pid=5934485)
Most likely, the reverse DNS is misconfigured. This is the number one reason for ssh-login delays. Maybe, the nameservers initially put into the router's configuration are no longer reachable due to subsequent "hardening". Or, maybe, they went away and were replaced long ago — without anybody telling the routers. Nothing else on a router uses DNS usually, so this problem affects only ssh-daemon and gets blamed on it...
The daemon could, of course, be a little bit smarter and not try to do a reverse DNS, when there are no hostname-based authorization rules in the first place... But that's a minor bug compared to reverse DNS being dysfunctional.
Re:Why is this a big deal? (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Saturday September 02 2006, @12:18AM)
Re:Why is this a big deal? (Score:4, Informative)
(http://2130706433/ | Last Journal: Thursday July 19, @10:29AM)
If you're on Solaris 8 (SunOS 5.8 or Solaris 2.5.8) or 9 (SunOS 5.9, or Solaris 2.5.9), you appear to be safe.
This is relevant because large companies seldom jump to the newer versions until they have to - for production systems, as long as the older versions are supported and working, that's more important than gambling on existing software still working if upgrading the OS. So there's an awful lot of systems with Solaris 8 and 9 out there, but luckily they appear not to be affected.
Re:Why is this a big deal? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.inertnet.net/)
telnet 23/tcp imadumbass hackmenow rootrus rotflmao
Re:Why is this a big deal? (Score:5, Funny)
Having said that, today is a good day to find out if that head of IT you never liked anyway has telnet enabled on one of his Solaris machines
Re:Why is this a big deal? (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
That'll account for a couple thousand computers. It's left as an exercise for the reader to find other sites.
Are they just crazy? I know that almost every single box at FNAL has the telnet daemon running, and is behind no firewall. Why aren't they hacked-to-death? Kerberos.
FNAL has a policy that every service beyond central IT's web pages is protected by Kerberos. The Kerberos-enabled version of telnet is as secure as one can get; I've been told by their sysadmins that it is more secure than SSH because it is simpler and the network and authz/authn stacks are separated. So, historically, Kerberos-enabled telnet has had less bugs than SSH.
Just because YOU don't run telnet (or don't know how to run it securely) doesn't mean that there aren't thousands of boxes out there that are secured by it.
If there are actually any Sun boxes at FNAL (they were one of the original big adopters of Linux), you can bet they'll probably be turned off today...
Re:Why is this a big deal? (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday December 19 2006, @05:12PM)
If it were me I'd just log everything in every session (which is easy), and make the users use SSH. That way you can audit everything they do, every command they type, but still have a level of security. You have to remember that any user can sniff telnet traffic on the network, so forcing everyone to use telnet because you don't trust them means the ones who are untrustworthy have a better chance of stealing something useful from a coworker.
Even better would be to hire trustworthy people and treat them as such in the absence of evidence to the contrary.
Re:Why is this a big deal? (Score:4, Informative)
(Last Journal: Monday October 15, @11:53PM)
You're right... No more secure websites for you, since HTTPS is just HTTP over an SSL data stream.
You could just as easily use Kerberos to encrypt HTTP traffic as SSL, and that is indeed exactly what Kerberos does for just about any communications protocol...
Kerberos telnet is as encrypted as it gets.
Re:Why is this a big deal? (Score:5, Informative)
Who the hell even THINKS about enabling telnet on any box these days?
Sadly, a whole lot of people. I work for a company that makes very expensive and cool specialty servers that perform certain security related functions. As a security company, naturally we take care not to tarnish our reputation by leaving these servers vulnerable themselves. We try to encourage our customers to be moderately responsible as well, as any box can be made insecure. I know of at least on tier-1 ISP that has one of our boxes sitting publicly accessible with telnet enabled and no IP access restrictions.
As for who uses telnet in general, most ISPs in Asia seem to use telnet to configure their systems via their control networks. Large financial institutions in Europe use telnet, as use of encryption is restricted on their trusted networks, for reasons of transparency to the stock regulating authorities. ISPs in South America often use telnet and provide shell accounts to customers. I'm sure there are more groups that use it for one reason or another.
Telnet? (Score:2)
So what? (Score:1, Redundant)
(http://stupidfundy.blogspot.com/)
Hasn't telnet been the source of many dozens of *nix vulnerabilities in the past? From the synopsis, it sounds like this bug is only there because nobody is working on the telnet codebase anymore - it is likened to the Linux exploit from '94. For my own part, the first thing I do when setting up a *nix system is disable the daemon, and the second is to make sure the firewall blocks the port in all directions.
This is not to say this shouldn't be reported, but I think it is more an example why telnet can realistically be considered obsolete technology, and should always, ALWAYS be disabled by default. It's not Windows, after all.
Configuration issue (Score:1)
Re:Configuration issue (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Configuration issue (Score:5, Informative)
(http://zdzichubg.jogger.pl/ | Last Journal: Friday July 18 2003, @02:30PM)
1) this attack does not work:
Escape character is '^]'.
Not on system console
Connection closed by foreign host.
2) when installing U3 one can opt to close most services. This could be also done after installation with "netservices limited" command.
Re:Configuration issue (Score:4, Informative)
(http://moyix.jobonet.com/)
This has been confirmed on the latest version of Solaris 10.
not an excuse (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://aaronownsyou.blogspot.com/)
the authors seem very confused ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Then they start a tirade against sending passwords in the clear.
After that they say the fix is not to use telnet.
Putting aside the holier (more secure) than thou attitudes here about telnet security. I've got to say that not using something because it's broken is never a fix (unless you're a manager). The fix is to mend the problem. In the meantime, maybe, avoid the service. but bear in mind, someone still has to fix it.
OpenSolaris as a development model (Score:2, Informative)
(http://www.lewiz.org/)
The good news is that a third party has informed Sun of the info, who will now fix it.
The bad news is that we have no idea how long people have known about this problem...
0-day? (Score:3, Interesting)
I generally don't follow Solaris, and 11 might have just come out, but I seriously doubt 10 and 11 both came out at the same time.
Re:0-day? (Score:5, Informative)
Off By Default (Score:1)
The Exploit (Score:4, Informative)
So stupid.
what??? (Score:1)
We're not in the 90s anymore (Score:2)
(http://www.thepacketmaster.com/ | Last Journal: Monday July 07 2003, @12:36PM)
Didn't work on Solaris 10 01/06 (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.jaymzworld.com/)
Woah.. (Score:1)
I just got this in my inbox from Microsoft (Score:3, Funny)
(Last Journal: Wednesday April 27 2005, @01:58PM)
From: Steve Ballmer
Subject: Pwned
Body:
Microsoft:1 - Unix: NIL LOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!!!111
Love Steviepoo
Must not be evil ..... (Score:1)
(http://www.theneb.co.uk/)
There is no valid reason (Score:1)
yeah right.... (Score:2)
(http://reallydodgy.org/ | Last Journal: Thursday January 05 2006, @03:54AM)
Guh! (Score:2)
(http://www.flying-rhenquest.net/)
Data General's proactive approach to security (Actually having people read through and test all their code) turned up a lot of problems that would otherwise have gone unnoticed and would probably have been exploited at a later date. Perhaps the other commercial UNIX vendors should consider that approach rather than relying on code that no one's looked at in 20 years to be secure.
MUDs ok? (Score:2)
Credible Source? (Score:2)
The linked description does not seem to have any references to other descriptions of this vulnerability, nor do they seem to be showing up in Google or in the normal security channels. Anyone have a link to some real information on this. If this is truly a zero-day situation who was exploited and what are the details of the exploit? Was this a manual exploit or a worm?
I have no reason to doubt the linked description, but it is pretty vague. Where's the beef?
I'm trying to think... (Score:2)
Maybe the Solaris patch team figured the same thing.
What I'd do, if ... (Score:2)
No, not for cheap repay !
Not for the vulnerability as such. Not for the forgotten validity checks. Not for eventually shipping telnetd.
(Only Theo & friends can permit to not ship it.)
But:
- For enabling it by default; at install; in 2007
- Worse: for still not running it unprivileged; though that is possible
A blast from the past! (Score:2)
(http://mclarenhome.com/~dougmc/)
A similar fix would probably work now if anybody cared, but I imagine Sun will fix the hole properly quickly, probably more quickly than IBM fixed theirs back when, and not many people have telnet enabled on Internet-facing machines anymore anyways, but even so, it's amazing to see basically the same hole over ten years later. Linux has had similar problems too -- I believe the root source was Julianne/John F. Haugh's shadow suite [debian.org] back then, and I wonder if it's still the original source here.
telnetd NOT on "by default" in Solaris 10 (Score:3, Insightful)
You can either turn on everything (telnetd, ftpd, etc, etc), or only have sshd running when the box comes up for the first time.
So saying that telnetd is on "by default" isn't exactly correct, unless your definition of "by default" is "explicitly enabled".
- Roach
At least it's not a LD_PRELOAD bug (Score:2)
(http://phobos.illtel.denver.co.us)
This is... -froot indeed...
In related news... (Score:2)
(http://rg03.wordpress.com/)
New advertising slogan; (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Sun: Woefully inadequate - no excuse (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Monday July 04 2005, @11:18AM)
Solaris 10: Simple fix to this (Score:1)
I have CONSOLE=/dev/console set in
telnet -l"-froot" 10.24.47.9
Trying 10.24.47.9...
Connected to 10.24.47.9.
Escape character is '^]'.
Not on system console
Connection closed by foreign host.
And turn off telnet. Do: svcadm disable svc:/network/telnet:default as root.
And yes! It is STILL BETTER THAN P.O.S. Windoze!!!
--
Zombie Proc
What idiot still uses telnet on a unix box (Score:2)
Second, anyone that would still use telnetd on a unix system is not competent to be a unix admin in this day and age. (And no, Im not talking about using the telnet *client* to access hardware devices such as routers locally or to connect to SMTP for testing, etc; Im talking only about allowing inbound login from the public Internet via telnet to a unix system where security is evem remotely important)
WOW... (Score:1)
(http://letstalkcoding.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday November 29 2006, @08:00PM)
Telnet flame war (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Saturday November 10, @01:52PM)
It is possible to use SSH in an insecure manner. It is possible that SSH has exploits [google.com] as well.
I'm not advocating that telnet be reintroduced for standard and widespread deployment. Still, though, I would have thought that such a devoted group of computer enthusiasts would have a more level and sane point of view. Some people like to ride their bicycle or motorcycle without a helmet. Some people like to use telnet. So what?
Poor Solaris. I hope nobody was seriously injured by this exploit.
People still use telnet. (Score:1)
Temporary patches available (Score:2)
(http://dan.drydog.com/)
Temporary patches to fix telnet are available in zip files at: http://sunsolve.sun.com/pub-cgi/tpatch.pl [sun.com] (one for SPARC, one for X86 Solaris).
You need a (free) login to access these (my login was free)--security patches are free.
Fix almost available (Score:2)
(http://blogs.sun.com/tpenta)
I've done the work getting interim security fixes available and starting the sun-alert. These thing should be available shortly.
For a commentary on getting this fixed, have a look at http://blogs.sun.com/tpenta/entry/the_in_telnetd_v ulnerability_exploit [sun.com].
I'll update the blog entry with the links when it's up on sunsolve.
Tp.
SunAlert & Temp Patches Available (Score:2)
(http://dan.drydog.com/)
SunAlert 102802 [sun.com] is available describing the issue and workaround.
Temporary patches for SPARC and X86 to fix telnet are available [sun.com] You need a (free) login to access this.
Re:Here come the fanboys (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Tuesday December 19 2006, @05:12PM)
Still, first poster is right. Wtf uses telnet anymore, unless they're dealing with the most legacy of legacy crap.
Re:Here come the fanboys (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Tuesday December 19 2006, @05:12PM)
Re:Is it a buffer overflow? (Score:2, Informative)
(http://blue.9mm.com/~icer)
Its not a buffer overflow, its just unvalidated input.
Re:Is it a buffer overflow? (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Saturday March 03 2007, @04:33AM)
Re:Is it a buffer overflow? (Score:2)
We'll just suddenly and completely rewrite nearly every operating system we use. Yeah, that shouldn't be too hard!
Re:Telnet? Useless... (Score:1, Funny)
That was the worst comment I've ever read. If someone wants to know about telnet, they can look it up on wikipedia. It even includes a section on security of telnet.
Re:Is it a buffer overflow? (Score:1)
(http://12.183.160.165/~ccfreak2k/index.html | Last Journal: Tuesday October 03 2006, @12:11PM)
Re:RootWont work if CONSOLE set in /etc/default/lo (Score:2)
(http://ettlz.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday February 12 2006, @06:53PM)
Um...
Re:Is it a buffer overflow? (Score:2)
Re:Anyone tested it? (Score:1)
(http://members.shaw.ca/trogl | Last Journal: Monday December 20 2004, @02:15PM)
Sigh. (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Friday November 02, @02:49PM)
Knives don't kill people. People with knives kill people.
Clubs don't kill people. People with clubs kill people.
Fists don't kill people. People with fists kill people.
Poisons don't kill people. People with poisons kill people.
Cars don't kill people. People with cars kill people.
Cans of gasoline don't kill people. People with cans of gasoline kill people.
If you try to disarm people, where do you stop?
Why do I object? Because guns (or "people with guns") also protect people (including the person with the gun). They do this in several ways, including by opposing unprovoked attacks. Apparently, in that case alone, they prevent more death and injury than they cause, by a factor of several.
The quoted formulation leads to the false belief that killing can be reduced by banning guns (when in fact such attempts apparently greatly increase it "in the wild").
Dropping it into a discussion of another subject, if the poster is not called on it, propagates the dangerous meme.
The extension I posted above is intended to
Yes, my posting is off-topic. So is the parent. If I had mod points at this time I'd have just modded the parent down as off-topic. So instead I'm putting my own karma on the line to oppose the propagation of a meme that has killed countless people and continues to do so to this day.
I request any moderator that choses to mod THIS post down to do the same to the parent. I also request that any moderator who finds the parent posting has less off-topic down-mods than this one to add another down-mod to just the parent. To do otherwise is to take sides in the political debate injected into a different topic's discussion by the parent poster.