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Re: CVE request -- coreutils -- tty hijacking possible in "su" via TIOCSTI ioctl


From: Ludwig Nussel <ludwig.nussel () suse de>
Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2011 11:55:11 +0200

Jan Lieskovsky wrote:
Hello Josh, Steve, vendors,

   based on Debian BTS report:
   [1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=628843
       (first CVE-2011-XXYY required for Debian case)

looked more into original report:
[2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=173008

and the first paragraph of [2] suggests:
"When starting a program via "su - user -c program" the user session
can escape to the parent session by using the TIOCSTI ioctl to push
characters into the input buffer.  This allows for example a non-root
session to push "chmod 666 /etc/shadow" or similarly bad commands into
the input buffer such  that after the end of the session they are
executed."

The issue also reminds me that there are several su implemenations.
On Fedora and SUSE we have a patched coreutils version, Debian uses
the one from shadow-utils and then there's also a su from
SimplePAMApps, used by e.g. Owl. Of course each one has it's own
quirks and weird features. Does anyone still remember why a
particular implementation was chosen? :-)

cu
Ludwig

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