Re: Solaris 7 x86 lpset exploit.

[Darren Moffat - Solaris Sustaining Engineering]

>on all solaris/sparc app's i have used so far, there is a reason,
>why SUN does enable stack execution by default, if i am correctly
>informed this is due to some fortran or rare/old compiler issue,
>and might break some fortran or other alien language code...

Correct, some lisp and Objective C compilers use trampolineing as part
of their compiler/interpreter mechanism this relies on executing code
sitting on the stack.

The most important reason is that SPARCv{7,8} ABI requires the
stack to be executable so chaining it would mean Solaris was no
longer compliant with the SPARC ABI.

SPARCv9 ABI has the stack non-executable so 64bit programs already
have a nonexec_user_stack style of protection.  Note that you need
the Sun Workshop C compiler 5.0 or above to generate 64bit binaries.

--
Darren J Moffat