Solaris

Originally Posted by jlliagre

Please don't advise that ...

Precisely. I just checked on a Solaris 10 update 2 and /usr/ucb/ps code is shared by 62 binaries, including mdb and dtrace (man isaexec to understand why). That means you basically grant root access to anyone with adding the setuid bit to ps.

...

Originally Posted by jlliagre

You should ask your application team fix their script. It currently rely on a buggy behavior.

Make sure the latest Solaris 10 security patches are applied.

Perhaps have some of your servers been compromised.

For security reasons, except for the psinfo, usage, lpsinfo,
lusage, lwpsinfo, and lwpusage files, which are world-
readable, and except for privileged processes, an open of a
/proc file fails unless both the user-ID and group-ID of the
caller match those of the traced process and the process's
object file is readable by the caller. The effective set of
the caller is a superset of both the inheritable and the
permitted set of the target process. The limit set of the
caller is a superset of the limit set of the target process.
Except for the world-readable files just mentioned, files
corresponding to setuid and setgid processes can be opened
only by the appropriately privileged process.

A process that is missing the basic privilege
{PRIV_PROC_INFO} cannot see any processes under /proc that
it cannot send a signal to.

A process that has {PRIV_PROC_OWNER} asserted in its effec-
tive set can open any file for reading. To manipulate or
control a process, the controlling process must have at
least as many privileges in its effective set as the target
process has in its effective, inheritable, and permitted
sets. The limit set of the controlling process must be a
superset of the limit set of the target process. Additional
restrictions apply if any of the uids of the target process
are 0. See privileges(5).