Skip to Content
Network Security Assessment
book

Network Security Assessment

by Chris McNab
March 2004
Intermediate to advanced
396 pages
11h
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Network Security Assessment

Chapter 12. Assessing Unix RPC Services

Vulnerabilities in Unix RPC services have led to many large organizations falling victim to hackers over the last 10 years. One recent incident in April 1999 resulted in the web sites of Playboy, Sprint, O’Reilly Media, Sony Music, Sun Microsystems, and others being mass-defaced by H4G1S and the Yorkshire Posse (HTML mirrored at http://www.2600.com/hackedphiles/current/oreilly/hacked/). In this chapter, I cover remote RPC service vulnerabilities in Solaris, IRIX, and Linux, exploring how these services are exploited in the wild and how you can protect them.

Enumerating Unix RPC Services

A number of interesting Unix daemons (including NIS+, NFS, and CDE components) run as Remote Procedure Call (RPC) services using dynamically assigned high ports. To keep track of registered endpoints and present clients with accurate details of listening RPC services, a portmapper service listens on TCP and UDP port 111.

The RPC portmapper (also known as rpcbind within Solaris) can be queried using the rpcinfo command found on most Unix-based platforms, as shown in Example 12-1.

Example 12-1. Using rpcinfo to list accessible RPC service endpoints
# rpcinfo -p 192.168.0.50 program vers proto port service 100000 4 tcp 111 rpcbind 100000 4 udp 111 rpcbind 100024 1 udp 32772 status 100024 1 tcp 32771 status 100021 4 udp 4045 nlockmgr 100021 2 tcp 4045 nlockmgr 100005 1 udp 32781 mountd 100005 1 tcp 32776 mountd 100003 2 udp 2049 nfs 100011 1 udp 32822 rquotad 100002 ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Network Security Strategies

Network Security Strategies

Aditya Mukherjee
CCNA Cyber Ops SECFND #210-250 Official Cert Guide

CCNA Cyber Ops SECFND #210-250 Official Cert Guide

Omar Santos, Joseph Muniz, Stefano De Crescenzo

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 059600611XErrata Page