Monday, December 16. 2019
#include </etc/shadow>
Recently I saw a tweet where someone mentioned that you can include /dev/stdin in C code compiled with gcc. This is, to say the very least, surprising.
When you see something like this with an IT security background you start to wonder if this can be abused for an attack. While I couldn't come up with anything, I started to wonder what else you could include. As you can basically include arbitrary paths on a system this may be used to exfiltrate data - if you can convince someone else to compile your code.
There are plenty of webpages that offer online services where you can type in C code and run it. It is obvious that such systems are insecure if the code running is not sandboxed in some way. But is it equally obvious that the compiler also needs to be sandboxed?
How would you attack something like this? Exfiltrating data directly through the code is relatively difficult, because you need to include data that ends up being valid C code. Maybe there's a trick to make something like /etc/shadow valid C code (you can put code before and after the include), but I haven't found it. But it's not needed either: The error messages you get from the compiler are all you need. All online tools I tested will show you the errors if your code doesn't compile.
I even found one service that allowed me to add
#include </etc/shadow>
and showed me the hash of the root password. This effectively means this service is running compile tasks as root.
Including various files in /etc allows to learn something about the system. For example /etc/lsb-release often gives information about the distribution in use. Interestingly, including pseudo-files from /proc does not work. It seems gcc treats them like empty files. This limits possibilities to learn about the system. /sys and /dev work, but they contain less human readable information.
In summary I think services letting other people compile code should consider sandboxing the compile process and thus make sure no interesting information can be exfiltrated with these attack vectors.
When you see something like this with an IT security background you start to wonder if this can be abused for an attack. While I couldn't come up with anything, I started to wonder what else you could include. As you can basically include arbitrary paths on a system this may be used to exfiltrate data - if you can convince someone else to compile your code.
There are plenty of webpages that offer online services where you can type in C code and run it. It is obvious that such systems are insecure if the code running is not sandboxed in some way. But is it equally obvious that the compiler also needs to be sandboxed?
How would you attack something like this? Exfiltrating data directly through the code is relatively difficult, because you need to include data that ends up being valid C code. Maybe there's a trick to make something like /etc/shadow valid C code (you can put code before and after the include), but I haven't found it. But it's not needed either: The error messages you get from the compiler are all you need. All online tools I tested will show you the errors if your code doesn't compile.
I even found one service that allowed me to add
#include </etc/shadow>
and showed me the hash of the root password. This effectively means this service is running compile tasks as root.
Including various files in /etc allows to learn something about the system. For example /etc/lsb-release often gives information about the distribution in use. Interestingly, including pseudo-files from /proc does not work. It seems gcc treats them like empty files. This limits possibilities to learn about the system. /sys and /dev work, but they contain less human readable information.
In summary I think services letting other people compile code should consider sandboxing the compile process and thus make sure no interesting information can be exfiltrated with these attack vectors.
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Accessing /etc/shadow with a compiler? Surely not.
On all systems that I have available I get the following:
$ cat t.c
#include
$ gcc t.c
t.c:1:10: fatal error: /etc/shadow: Permission denied
#include
^~~~~~~~~~~~~
compilation terminated.
On all systems that I have available I get the following:
$ cat t.c
#include
$ gcc t.c
t.c:1:10: fatal error: /etc/shadow: Permission denied
#include
^~~~~~~~~~~~~
compilation terminated.
As he said: "This effectively means this service is running compile tasks as root"
I assume you don't run your compiler as root.
I assume you don't run your compiler as root.
This reminds me of a compiler bomb attack involving C source code crafted to require massive amounts of memory and diskspace to compile.
On some OSs and filesystems you can also include directories as regular files. This allows you to enumerate files on the system.
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Hanno Böck
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You may also find my newsletter about climate change and decarbonization technologies interesting.
Hanno Böck
mail: hanno@hboeck.de
Hanno on Mastodon
Impressum
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