On 26 September 2014 12:06, Chris Hellyar <[email protected]> wrote:

> While I don't disagree with the statement that any execution environment
> can be used to get the result from the flawed version of bash, the remote
> exploit is via apache/cgi at this stage and exploiting it via
> php/pearl/python would be of little value to attacker as it would be a low
> value secondary vector.
>

As long as any of those calls 'system()' and system is implemented in terms
of 'sh -c' and 'sh' is a symlink to bash, ( a very common arrangement ),
env based exploits will still work here as soon as a bash instance is fired.

Because ENV is implicitly inherited by those languages, and passed on to
their children during fork+exec , ENV becomes an open conduit for malicious
code and the intermediate languages of any kind simply work as naive
carriers unless they explicitly filter out ENV they inherit.

So all you need is a top level somewhere that stores user specified values
in any ENV field.

And that may not even require CGI binaries in some cases, but it is the
most likely way you'll see it.

( ie: Hypothetically, if Apache simply inflated arbitrary ENV keys from
HTTP requests within the Apache process itself, and then subsequently
called bash inside the same process for any reason in such a way those ENV
was inherited, your pooch is screwed )

And worse, this can all take place *prior* to authentication taking place,
as authentication may requires the authentication tokens to be passed via
ENV.

SSH is a harder target because the vulnerability doesn't trigger until the
channel is activated and authorised and then the ENV leaks over the
connection once established.

There may be some hype to this, but given we don't know a lot about the
reality of this problem, considering we just discovered it after it being
out there for well over 20 years, I think its better to err on the side of
caution and assume vulnerability until some kind of confidence is offered
to the contrary.

( You can never prove something invulnerable, and you cant ever make
anything completely invulnerable )

-- 
Kent

*KENTNL* - https://metacpan.org/author/KENTNL
_______________________________________________
Linux-users mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.canterbury.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/linux-users

Reply via email to