Bugtraq mailing list archives

Re: ftpd bug? Was: bin/1805: Bug in ftpd


From: poland () cam2 gsfc nasa gov (James Poland 6-5251)
Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 08:52:57 -0400


Martin's method works for Solaris 2.5.1 as well. 'strings' on the core file
reveals the complete contents of /etc/shadow. This is not good. To reiterate,
if someone else is running an ftp session on host_a, start your own ftp
session with host_a. Then issue the commands
ftp> cd /tmp
ftp> user root wrongpasswd
ftp> quote pasv

Examine the resulting core file with the strings command.

This method does not work with Solaris 2.4.


James Poland 6-5251 wrote:

On Solaris 2.5.1, the core file contains only the user's password in
cleartext. How hard is it to crash someone else's ftp session?

Killing from the command line doesn't seem to work, but:

SunOS 5.5:

logon via ftp with your regular user/password,
ftp> cd /tmp
ftp> user root wrongpasswd
ftp> quote pasv

voila, root password in world readable core dump under /tmp

-Martin

PS: Sun's ftpd doesn't core when issuing "quote pasv" before logon,
    so the seem to have used the proposed fix

         Checking for "pw != NULL"

    So this proposal was simple and obvious   ... and incomplete. :)




Current thread: