An issue was discovered in illumos before 2020-10-22, as used in OmniOS before r151030by, r151032ay, and r151034y and SmartOS before 20201022. There is a buffer overflow in parse_user_name in lib/libpam/pam_framework.c.

This vulnerability allows local attackers to escalate privileges on vulnerable installations of Joyent SmartOS release-20170803-20170803T064301Z. An attacker must first obtain the ability to execute low-privileged code on the target system in order to exploit this vulnerability. The specific flaw exists within the DTrace DOF files. The issue results from the lack of proper validation of user-supplied data, which can result in a write past the end of an allocated object. An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to execute code under the context of the host OS. Was ZDI-CAN-5106.