Executive brief
The printers utility in the SGI IRIX operating system contains a security flaw that allows a local user to gain full administrative (root) control over the system. This utility is responsible for managing printer configurations, and the vulnerability can be exploited by a standard user to bypass security restrictions and potentially access sensitive data or disrupt operations. This issue affects older versions of the IRIX platform commonly used in high-performance computing environments.
Technical details
A buffer overflow vulnerability exists in the /usr/sbin/printers executable in SGI IRIX. The flaw is triggered via the -xrm command-line argument, which fails to properly validate the length of input data before copying it into a fixed-size buffer. A local attacker can exploit this by passing a specially crafted, overly long string to the program, allowing them to overwrite the return address on the stack and redirect execution to an attacker-supplied shellcode. Successful exploitation results in arbitrary code execution with root privileges. The vulnerability has been confirmed on IRIX versions 5.3, 6.2, and 6.3.
Affected products
- SGI IRIX 5.3, 6.2, 6.3
Timeline
- 1997-05-27: disclosed: Exploit code posted to Bugtraq mailing list by David Hedley
- 1998-05-01: advisory: NVD publication date