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Re: [Pkg-xfce-devel] Bug#639151: Bug#639151: Bug#639151: Local privilege escalation


From: Yves-Alexis Perez <corsac () debian org>
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2011 13:40:16 +0200

On ven., 2011-08-26 at 21:14 +0400, Solar Designer wrote:
On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 11:07:20AM +0200, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote:
Would something like:

diff --git a/src/dmrc.c b/src/dmrc.c
index bff1da8..9f38faf 100644
--- a/src/dmrc.c
+++ b/src/dmrc.c
@@ -80,11 +80,25 @@ dmrc_save (GKeyFile *dmrc_file, const gchar
*username)
     /* Update the users .dmrc */
     if (user)
     {
+      /* write the file as the user itself */
+      pid_t pid;
+      pid = fork();
+
+      if (pid == 0)
+      {
+        if (setuid (user_get_uid(user)) < 0)
+        {
+          g_warning("Error changing uid for %s: %s", username,
g_strerror(errno));
+          _exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
+        }

You also need to switch gid and groups, and you do not have to fork()
if
you only switch euid/egid/groups or fsuid/fsgid/groups.  The latter
may
be less portable, but at least on Linux it affects only the current
thread in a multi-threaded process.  Probably this difference is
irrelevant in your case, though.

Well, I don't think lightdm is linux-only and at least in Debian it'd be
nice to have it available and safe on kfreebsd (and hurd, haha).

Here's an example:

http://git.altlinux.org/people/ldv/packages/?p=pam.git;a=commitdiff;h=pam_modutil_priv

A tricky part is what to do when you have partially switched
credentials
and one of the syscalls fails (e.g., you've switched the gid but not
yet
the uid).  The code referenced above (Linux-PAM commit) tries to
restore
the old credentials, but ignores possible failure to do so.  A better
action might be to terminate the current process on failure to restore
old credentials.

Yeah, right now with the fork() approach, I think it's safe to exit with
EXIT_FAILURE if anything goes bad and not try too hard to fall our feet.

         path = g_build_filename (user_get_home_directory (user),
".dmrc", NULL);
         g_file_set_contents (path, data, length, NULL);
-        if (getuid () == 0 && chown (path, user_get_uid (user),
user_get_gid (user)) < 0)
-            g_warning ("Error setting ownership on %s: %s", path,
strerror (errno));
         g_free (path);
+        _exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
+
+      }
+      if (pid > 0)
+        wait(NULL);
     }

You're lucky that you don't seem to need to pass the result of
g_file_set_contents() back to the parent process.  If you were reading
rather than writing a file, you'd have difficulty using the fork()
approach.  However, in your case fork() may actually be fine (but you
do
need to drop gid and groups as well).

By the way, would you know some kind of lib for “safe privileges
dropping” for that kind of usage. I quickly looked at glib and while
they do have some primitives for process spawning, there's nothing
related to dropping privs. It looks like something which might be
useful.

Regards,
-- 
Yves-Alexis

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