How to get root on Ubuntu 20.04 by pretending nobody’s /home

Kevin Backhouse

...

This blog post is about an astonishingly straightforward way to escalate 
privileges on Ubuntu. With a few simple commands in the terminal, and a few 
mouse clicks, a standard user can create an administrator account for 
themselves. I have made a short demo video, to show how easy it is.

It's unusual for a vulnerability on a modern operating system to be this easy 
to exploit. I have, on some occasions, written thousands of lines of code to 
exploit a vulnerability. Most modern exploits involve complicated trickery, 
like using a memory corruption vulnerability to forge fake objects in the heap, 
or replacing a file with a symlink with microsecond accuracy to exploit a 
TOCTOU vulnerability. So these days it’s relatively rare to find a 
vulnerability that doesn’t require coding skills to exploit. I also think the 
vulnerability is easy to understand, even if you have no prior knowledge of how 
Ubuntu works or any security research experience.

...

https://securitylab.github.com/research/Ubuntu-gdm3-accountsservice-LPE




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