hardlinks to setuid binaries
Jan Schaumann <[email protected]> Fri, 25 Mar 2022 09:37:38 -0400
| Newsgroups | gmane.os.netbsd.devel.security |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Hello, I just came across this blog post here: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/03/15/link/ In a nutshell, the author describes how being able to create a hardlink to a setuid binary can lead to undesirable results: Suppose you have a setuid /usr/pkg/bin/sudo from sudo version 1.8.11, which is vulnerable to CVE-2014-9680. You create a hardlink in your home directory, so you get setuid, owned by root, mode 511 '~/sudo'. Now the sysadmin updates the sudo package, fixing the vulnerability, but your ~/.sudo remains vulnerable. On Linux, there appears to be a proc(5) restriction via /proc/sys/fs/protected_hardlinks making this impossible, but on NetBSD at least up to 9.2 this is possible. Any thoughts on this? Should there be a sysctl to disable this? This is not a new discovery; has this been discussed before? -Jan