Security Incidents mailing list archives

Re: cron exploit?


From: Steffen Kluge <kluge () fujitsu com au>
Date: Thu, 02 Oct 2003 11:44:42 +1000

On Thu, 2003-10-02 at 05:08, Barry Fitzgerald wrote:
Rule of thumb: anything that the user doesn't need to write to, mount as 
ro and only take it out of ro if necessary, mount all other 
write-required locations as nodev,nosuid,noexec...

Noexec seems to be a waste of time, at least on the Linux boxes I've
tested it. It is trivially circumvented, since it appears to be checked
only by the exec* system calls.

Something like `/lib/ld-linux.so.2 /tmp/prog' runs anything from a
noexec mounted /tmp filesystem, and is safe and easy to build into root
kits.

Nevertheless, noexec frustrates the occasional software installer
(vmware, openoffice), that extracts an install script to /tmp...

I'd be interested to hear how noexec is implemented on other Unixes, at
the moment I haven't got access to any I could play with.

Cheers
Steffen.

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