CVE-2010-4435 in Solaris
Summary
by MITRE
Unspecified vulnerability in Oracle Solaris 8, 9, and 10 allows remote attackers to affect confidentiality, integrity, and availability, related to CDE Calendar Manager Service Daemon and RPC. NOTE: the previous information was obtained from the January 2011 CPU. Oracle has not commented on claims from other software vendors that this affects other operating systems, such as HP-UX, or claims from a reliable third party that this is a buffer overflow in rpc.cmsd via long XDR-encoded ASCII strings in RPC call 10.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 01/20/2025
The vulnerability identified as CVE-2010-4435 represents a significant security flaw within Oracle Solaris operating systems version 8, 9, and 10 that affects the Common Desktop Environment CDE Calendar Manager Service Daemon and its underlying Remote Procedure Call implementation. This unspecified vulnerability demonstrates the inherent risks associated with complex desktop environment services that handle remote communications and data processing. The issue stems from the CDE Calendar Manager Service Daemon which operates as a background process providing calendar management functionality through RPC mechanisms, creating a potential attack surface that adversaries can exploit to compromise system security. The vulnerability's classification as affecting confidentiality, integrity, and availability indicates a comprehensive impact that extends beyond simple data exposure to encompass complete system compromise possibilities.
Technical analysis reveals this vulnerability likely involves improper input validation within the RPC call processing mechanism, specifically related to RPC call 10 which handles XDR-encoded ASCII strings. The buffer overflow potential suggests that when the cmsd daemon processes malformed or excessively long XDR-encoded data structures, it fails to properly bounds-check incoming parameters before storing them in memory buffers. This type of flaw falls under CWE-129 Input Validation and CWE-787 Out-of-bounds Write, representing classic buffer overflow conditions that can be exploited to execute arbitrary code or cause denial of service. The XDR (External Data Representation) encoding process, which standardizes data representation across different architectures, becomes a critical attack vector when improperly handled by the RPC service daemon.
The operational impact of this vulnerability extends far beyond simple network service disruption, as it provides attackers with the capability to compromise entire Solaris systems through remote exploitation. Attackers can leverage this vulnerability to gain unauthorized access to calendar data, potentially accessing sensitive personal or business information stored within the CDE environment. The integrity compromise aspect allows for modification of calendar entries, which could lead to misinformation campaigns or disruption of critical business operations. Availability impacts can manifest as denial of service conditions that prevent legitimate users from accessing calendar services or potentially causing system crashes that require manual intervention and system restarts. This vulnerability particularly affects enterprise environments where Solaris systems are deployed for business-critical applications, as the compromise of calendar services can disrupt coordinated business operations and potentially expose sensitive organizational data.
Mitigation strategies for CVE-2010-4435 should focus on immediate patch deployment from Oracle, which would address the underlying buffer overflow conditions in the cmsd daemon and RPC implementation. Organizations should also implement network segmentation to limit access to CDE services and restrict RPC communication to trusted networks only. The principle of least privilege should be enforced by disabling unnecessary CDE components and services that are not actively required for business operations. Additionally, monitoring systems should be configured to detect unusual RPC call patterns or malformed XDR data that could indicate exploitation attempts. From an ATT&CK framework perspective, this vulnerability maps to techniques involving remote service exploitation and privilege escalation, requiring defensive measures that include network traffic analysis and endpoint protection to detect potential exploitation attempts. Regular security assessments and vulnerability scanning should be conducted to identify similar issues in other system components and ensure comprehensive security posture maintenance.