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An evil person with e.g. a stolen SSH key can escalate privileges on a machine without needing the user's password. It's not simply about sudo working as design
by hosay123 14y ago
An evil person with e.g. a stolen SSH key can escalate privileges on a machine without needing the user's password. It's not simply about sudo working as designed, it allows bypassing sudo's user authentication entirely.
I can think of a handful of corporate machines (e.g. web servers) I've had pubkey access on where sudo allowed the real admin to gain root from the same account via sudo.
- __alexs 14y agoHow are they going to change the date without having a path to superuser access already?
- lukeschlather 14y agoThey could potentially spoof the machine's NTP server.
- DEinspanjer 14y agoThe NTP config on the machine would have to allow automatic changes without regard to the skew. I don't believe that is a default (or typically desired) configuration.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- juan_juarez 14y agoYou're building up a great big chain of complicated requirements. You're quickly approaching the point where it's easier to steal the machine.
- devicenull 14y agoYou mean, all of the NTP servers the machine uses. NTP will detect and reject a single server reporting bad time (assuming you have at least 3 servers configured, which is the recommendation). You'd also have to do this when the NTP daemon first starts up, as: -g Normally, ntpd exits with a message to the system log if the offset exceeds the panic threshold, which is 1000 s by default. This option allows the time to be set to any value without restriction; however, this can happen only once. If the threshold is exceeded after that, ntpd will exit with a message to the system log. This option can be used with the -q and -x options. See the tinker command for other options.
- jrockway 14y agoCan't the evil person with said access just wait until the person legitimately runs sudo? Today's exploit just allows the attack to happen more quickly, if the attacker happens to be able to change the time on the clock by a few billion seconds without escalated access.