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Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2014 02:12:22 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: local privilege escalation due to capng_lock as used in seunshare
On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 05:49:04PM -0400, Steve Grubb wrote:
> On Tuesday, April 29, 2014 02:20:47 PM Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> > if (setuid(getuid()) != 0)
> > err(1, "setuid(getuid())");
>
> If you do not want the saved uid to be available, you need to use setresuid.
> That removes it. I would classify this as a bug in the test program.
Not quite.
Per POSIX.1-2001, setuid() "shall set the real user ID, effective user
ID, and the saved set-user-ID of the calling process to uid" if the
process has "appropriate privileges". On traditional Unix systems,
without capabilities, running as root historically does constitute
"appropriate privileges". If we want current systems to support safely
running programs written for traditional Unix (including SUID root
programs), which I think is taken for granted by many of us, we must not
deviate from those semantics in dangerous ways. Any such deviation is a
vulnerability in our current kernel code or configuration.
Distributions must not ship with settings or programs that allow anyone
other than an administrator to alter the definition of "appropriate
privileges" in a way that, while compliant with this vague wording in
POSIX, introduces a vulnerability for correct programs written for
traditional Unix systems.
What we have here is a reincarnation of:
"Sendmail Workaround for Linux Capabilities Bug"
https://www.sendmail.com/sm/open_source/security/security_docs/sendmail.8.10.1.LINUX-SECURITY.txt
albeit in slightly different shape (not entirely in the kernel, but with
a userland "helper").
I think that sendmail-exposed vulnerability was in the kernel (not in
sendmail), and I think the vulnerability Andy is reporting is in some
distros (apparently, Red Hat's).
Of course, it is possible that I have missed something important as I
did not look into this issue closely, but the above is my current
understanding based on Andy's message.
Alexander
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