Full Disclosure mailing list archives

Re: Symlink attack techniques


From: James Longstreet <jlongs2 () uic edu>
Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2005 18:14:51 -0600


On Dec 15, 2005, at 7:09 AM, Werner Schalk wrote:

Ok I should have been more precise in my previous mail. In this scenario I
don't have control over the output generated by the find command. So
basically the cronjob is something like:

15 4 * * 6 root /usr/bin/find /home/userA -type f -print > /tmp/ report.txt

Consequently as userB I have no way of influencing what information is printed
by the find command to /tmp/report.txt but I can surely
control /tmp/report.txt. Any other ideas of how to exploit this to gain root
access?

Since it doesn't seem like you can control what gets written to the file, you probably can't directly get root access from there. The output could have some ill effect if written to the correct file... hard to know without knowing what the output is.

Of course, as was already suggested, you can be malicious and destructive and destroy /etc/passwd (or any other file on the system), but I don't see right away how to gain root from that.
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