Re: Solaris telnet vulnberability - how many on your network?

[Darren Reed <avalon () caligula anu edu au>]

In some mail from greimer () fccc edu, sie said:
> 1) This seems like a case of "old code" somehow creeping back in to the 
> current versions, and that's a phenomenon I've seen happen at a couple of 
> different places that I've worked at over the years. It's kind of a 
> special case of version control gone bad, and I'm interested in how that 
> can happen and how to watch out for it.
>
> 1a) People have said that this bug was in old versions of SunOS/Solaris 
> (and AIX I think) but nobody ever nailed down exactly when this was fixed, 
> versionwise. In fact, did anybody reproduce this in anything other than 
> Solaris 10? It'd be nice to know the last old version that has the bug, & 
> the 1st that doesn't.

Solaris's /bin/login has never supported the "-f" command line option
until Solaris 10 (RTFM) so this exploit was just plain not possible.

The other avenue for passing command line args to telnet is through
the TERM telnet option, but Solaris stopped passing that through on
the command line a long time ago (maybe 2.3 or earlier?)

> 2) Does this have anything to do with the OpenSolaris effort?

No.

> Like are people pulling in code from other sources?

More people should go back and read Casper's email where he explained
that it came about with a Kerberos project.

Darren