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Some common services run with elevated privileges, and can be dangerous if set up incorrectly or are outdated
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Some common services run with elevated privileges, and can be dangerous if set up incorrectly or are outdated
Last updated
There are some common programs that require the SUID bit to work, like sudo. There is a lot of research into finding vulnerabilities in these programs specifically for Privilege Escalation. You can look up the version of a program with a term like "exploit" or "CVE" to find known exploits for it. and are is great resources where Proof of Concepts are often shared, so make sure to search there if you know the program is vulnerable.
Here are a few easily exploitable vulnerabilities in common outdated programs:
The exploit affects versions from (including) v5.14 to (including) v6.6, excluding patched branches v5.15.149>, v6.1.76>, v6.6.15>. The patch for these versions were released in feb 2024. The underlying vulnerability affects all versions (excluding patched stable branches) from v3.15 to v6.8-rc1.
Caveats:
The exploit does not work v6.4> kernels with kconfig
CONFIG_INIT_ON_ALLOC_DEFAULT_ON=y(including Ubuntu v6.5)The exploits requires user namespaces (kconfig
CONFIG_USER_NS=y), that those user namespaces are unprivileged (sh commandsysctl kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone= 1), and that nf_tables is enabled (kconfigCONFIG_NF_TABLES=y). By default, these are all enabled on Debian, Ubuntu, and KernelCTF. Other distro's have not been tested, but may work as well.The exploit may be unstable on systems with a lot of network activity
Systems with WiFi adapter, when surrounded by high-usage WiFi networks, will be very unstable.
On test devices, please turn off WiFi adapters through BIOS.
Exploiting a target is as simple as compiling the repository with make, and then running the created ./exploit binary on a target to receive an interactive root shell. Even Fileless execution for constrained environments or to avoid detection is supported, check out the repository for more details on this.
ld.so < 2.37-r7 (CVE-2023-4911)A vulnerability in the glibc loader was found, which is used in almost all SUID binaries. It can be triggered via environment variables, specifically GLIBC_TUNABLES. A simple proof-of-concept was made to test if the current version is vulnerable, which uses any SUID binary like su:
Disabled: "Search offset" which will try offsets 128-1024 until a dummy payload triggers
Enabled: "Exploit" which uses a static offset to exploit it in a real environment
Finding this offset is important because not all environments have the same one. A few common ones are included in the TARGETS variable in the Python script above. For consistent success on arbitrary systems, you should first recreate the target environment and disable ASLR:
Then use any of these working offsets with ASLR enabled to get a shell in a few minutes:
A proof-of-concept was made in C that you need to compile and run on the target:
If compilers like gcc are not available on the target, you could try the Python version:
A simple proof-of-concept script was quickly made in C that you likely need to compile on the target:
If compilers like gcc are not available on the target, you could try the Python version:
Bash is by far the most common shell, and has had a few updates to change certain features. In previous versions of bash, there were some tricks to exploit SUID binaries with functions and environment variables. To check the version of bash use:
In these older bash versions, it was possible to define a function with the name of a full path to a program. This way, if you would specify the full path to that program, it would instead execute the function you defined with the same name. This makes it possible to overwrite absolute paths like /usr/sbin/service ran by SUID binaries, by defining a malicious function with the same name:
When bash is in debug mode, it has the PS4 variable which provides a custom prompt when a command is executed by the program. But the variable can run arbitrary commands with the $() command substitution syntax. You can set bash in debug mode with SHELLOPTS=xtrace, and then just set the PS4 variable. Getting a direct shell with /bin/bash -p has some weird output, so I recommend just copying /bin/bash to another location and setting the SUID bit on it, so you can later run it for your root shell:
One of the greatest exploits does not rely on specific SUID binaries, but, exploits the Linux kernel itself. This CVE-2024-1086 affects a wide range of versions and is very reliable at giving you a quick root shell. If you're into learning all the inner details of this exploit, . It affects the following versions taken from their README (check with uname -r):
If you find that it is vulnerable, you can exploit it using one of the many scripts that were made. A useful one is the one made by which has 2 modes depending on ASLR:
Polkit's pkexec program is another SUID binary. It had a vulnerability with the PATH variable allowing you to load an arbitrary shared library, and execute any code you want. For all the technical details see .
The sudoedit program has a Heap-Based Buffer Overflow vulnerability. For all the technical details see .