News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:PoC to demonstrate root permission hijacking by exploitin... by Foxboron on Friday May 03, 2024 @10:05AM (#40247802)
I think it's worth pointing out that all demonstrations of this issue either needs yama to be disabled for `ptrace` to work (this is what reptyr does under the hood), or you need to be part of the parent process to abuse the tty terminal.

The other demonstration shows the latter part, but requires you to have a reverse shell in the parent and can't be abused across users.

https://twitter.com/hackerfantastic/status/17860809689581612...

Generally, this issue is overblown. Both of these "exploits" works on `su`, `sudo` and probably `doas` because of session caching or because you have access to `ptrace`.

I'm not sure what security boundary you are breaking and this seems more like a cheap dig at `systemd` to feed into the decade-old hate train at this point.

Re:PoC to demonstrate root permission hijacking by exploitin... by uidnobody on Friday May 03, 2024 @10:03PM (#40254221)
3rd example, its a pty permission problem as the OP said in his initial post and he suggested a tested fix. https://x.com/hackerfantastic/status/1786485377617846348
Re:PoC to demonstrate root permission hijacking by exploitin... by bahorn on Friday May 03, 2024 @11:49PM (#40254646)
This is not a systemd-run specific issue either.

I reproduced this targeting sudo (just `cat` the parent tty), in fact able to capture my password as I type it in, and capture commands as they are being typed in. Surprised it was not mentioned that it breaks the terminal while you run it, no characters get sent to the program.

Re:PoC to demonstrate root permission hijacking by exploitin... by uidnobody on Saturday May 04, 2024 @04:32AM (#40255941)
in the case of systemd the pty remains user owned once the root program is attached, this allows any user process to read and hijack the root program. sudo, su and doas ymmv. The suggested fix for systemd is to chown the slave pty to the user privilege that matches the attached program to prevent misuse.
Re:PoC to demonstrate root permission hijacking by exploitin... by bahorn on Saturday May 04, 2024 @07:19AM (#40256762)
I understand the issue, I have checked /dev/pts/ and seen systemd-run create a user readable pts there. I'm not adverse to that one getting chown()'d, but there really isn't any impact from it.

The problem is you can not hijack (meaning command exec right?) a root shell running under your account with this unless there is an approach that hasn't been mentioned yet. You can read character input, stopping the program from receiving input while you are doing so, of a process your user account directly started. I investigated the other ways and he hasn't given a viable one beyond running stuff directly in shell of the target session (TIOCSTI doesn't work if you target a different pty) or using ptrace.

All of these apply to other programs as even though they set root permissions on their pty as you can influence their parent. You need to chown both if you want to stop issues, but that'll probably break stuff. To be clear his whole point is that systemd is less secure compared to sudo etc but is using something that applies to everything to try and show that, involving using pocs that didn't even show the issues he was claiming, which is disingenuous.

Re:PoC to demonstrate root permission hijacking by exploitin... by uidnobody on Saturday May 04, 2024 @09:02AM (#40257359)
so fix the issue by chown the pty created by systemd and give the OP his dues for pointing the issue out, seems like unnecessary flaming beyond that as to why this can be used to freely hijack root permissions with ptrace_classic and tty ioctls is a wider problem that should also be addressed and protected against when elevating rights. Microsoft "sudo.exe" doesnt have the same issue and fixed an insecure pipe permission quickly that allowed it. As for the boundary policy kit auth for systemd-run is one-shot meaning users should be prompted for each elevation request but looks to be persistent for the lifetime of the elevated process as policy kit is no longer requesting auth when the user does any of the three methods OP outlined.
Re:PoC to demonstrate root permission hijacking by exploitin... by Foxboron on Monday May 06, 2024 @11:09AM (#40275573)
They have blocked me so I can't read their tweets.