A vulnerability and a security issue have been reported in Sun Solaris, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to disclose sensitive information or potentially gain escalated privileges.

1) ld.so uses the LANG, LC_ALL, and LC_MESSAGES environment variables to load localised error messages. This can be exploited to leak information by loading malicious format specifiers via e.g. directory traversal sequences within the LANG environment variable.

Note: This vulnerability is limited to information disclosure, but in combination with the second vulnerability described below, this may be exploited to execute arbitrary code with escalated privileges.

2) A boundary error exists within the "doprf()" function in ld.so and can be exploited to cause a buffer overflow by passing specially crafted strings to the function. This can only be exploited by unprivileged users in combination with another vulnerability, like the directory-traversal attack mentioned above.

Solution
Apply patches or interim security reliefs.
Further details available in Customer Area

Provided and/or discovered by
1) Discovered by an anonymous person and reported via iDEFENSE.
2) Sean Larsson, iDefense Labs

Original Advisory
iDefense Labs:
http://labs.idefense.com/intelligence/vulnerabilities/display.php?id=449
http://labs.idefense.com/intelligence/vulnerabilities/display.php?id=450

Sun Microsystems:
http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetkey=1-26-102724-1

Deep Links
Links available in Customer Area