Executive brief
A vulnerability in older versions of the Solaris operating system allows an individual with physical access to the computer to gain full administrative control. During the system startup process, if a disk consistency check fails, the system may drop into a command prompt with root privileges without requiring a password. This could allow an unauthorized person to access sensitive data, modify system files, or disrupt operations.
Technical details
This vulnerability is a local privilege escalation occurring during the boot process of Solaris 2.2 and 2.3. When the 'fsck' (file system consistency check) utility encounters an unrecoverable error or failure during startup, the system initialization scripts fail to properly secure the environment and instead drop the console into a single-user mode root shell. An attacker with physical access to the machine can trigger or wait for this state to bypass authentication and obtain full root privileges. This is a classic boot-time configuration flaw where the failure state of a system maintenance tool results in an insecure fallback.
Affected products
- Sun Microsystems Solaris 2.2, 2.3
Timeline
- 1993-12-16: disclosed