Re: Insecurities in Non-exclusive Scoket Binding

From: Oliver Friedrichs (oliver_friedrichsat_private)
Date: Tue Mar 11 2003 - 08:38:44 PST

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    Firosh Ummer  wrote:
    >>Socket hijacking itself is not new - it has been cited in several sources
    
    >>on the net. What I find disturbing is how easy it is for an attacker to
    >>hijack a privileged connection and then insert privileged commands,
    >>running with very low privileges.
    
    >This is an old, old story.  I remember reading many years ago about this
    >kind of attack on NFS.  (NFS runs on port 2049.)  You're right that it's
    >an issue, and I don't know of any perfect defense.  But then, most Unices
    >are frankly not very secure against local privilege elevation attacks,
    >so I wouldn't rely too heavily on standard Unix distributions to prevent
    >non-root users from getting root anyway.  (Maybe I'm alone in that last
    >sentiment.)
    
    This is true.  In fact, I wrote a proof-of-concept NFS server in 1996 for
    this.  It simply took over port 2049 for a brief period, and sent a
    setuid-root copy of /bin/sh over to the client system.  Of course it
    wouldn't work if it was mounted nosuid, but in other cases, anyone
    executing the shell on the client that had a mounted filesystem from the
    server running the fake NFS server would become root.
    
    Oliver Friedrichs
    Sr. Manager - DeepSight
    Symantec, Inc.
    



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