Can’t wait for one that’ll work on Android so I can maybe root some otherwise useless old phones
What would you use the old phones for out of curiosity?
I’m not the person you replied to, but I would love to have more ARM hardware for running tests on. A lot of what I write needs to be separately tested on each architecture.
A middle finger to those you’re jailbreaking from.
Removing all the system-level bloat that makes them unpleasant to use, perhaps stripping one down to the level of a fancy MP3 player with its microSD slot. Also having “disposable” phones to play with various rooted tweaks. All of my easily-rootable phones are too valuable as daily drivers to experiment on, while all of the ones I don’t care about also don’t have rooting methods yet.
It was patched in almalinux though, and it was how this exploit got exposed before disclosure.
At lest this is what I read
Well shit. I wonder if all Linux systems are affected, the testing in the repo doesn’t cover Arch for instance. For now I’d assume the answer is yes.
Yea it works on arch, I just tested on my own PC:
OS: Arch Linux x86_64 Kernel: Linux 7.0.3-arch1-2❯ ./exp [root@arch dirtyfrag]# ls README.md assets exp exp.c [root@arch dirtyfrag]# whoami rootI updated it last week.
Edit: I just ran
yay -Suyto update everything and still works.Have you tried updating your system with a less cheerful command? Like
damn -Syu
Its a kernel exploit, so probably. But I just checked my arch installs,and I don’t have any of the kernel modules loaded.
Loading requires root anyway, so I think this may be fairly limited in reality?Edit: seems the modules get loaded automatically :(
They’ll get loaded, even without root
don’t see 'em loaded here, either. trixie (dietpi) server, aurora (f44) desktop
What’s up with all these vulnerabilities?
Kind of worried to be honest, two in like a week? Pretty scary.
I’m very dumb about Linux technical stuff but I feel like root access is way too easy to be accessed.
Is there any way to make it harder? I mean let’s say similar to Android, you need to unlock the boot loader first, flash a recovery and flash Magisk or something, that’s a good layer before root access.
At least for Linux Desktop, maybe make it so we can get root access only via a bootable USB with a correct password? Just for sporadic system changes.
Is there anything like that?
It’s a positive thing, don’t be worried.
These vulns already existed. It’s possible the bad guys were already using them. This gets them out in the open and on their way to being resolved.
Just keep patches up to date with any modern and maintained distro and you’ll be grand.
With AI enabled bug hunting, you’re likely to see a blitz of vulnerabilities, followed by a significant reduction in vulnerabilities.
Yes, malicious folks are usin em – heck, Kali’s had AI integrations for a while on a bunch of its tools even, for pen testing. But devs writing code get em too, and those are the people we need to see using these sorts of workflows as it lets them clip a bunch of zero days.
I think Mozilla, as an example, had a recent patch that cleaned up something like 271 zero days? Anthropic taking their Mythos stuff to banks/govt was largely just a publicity thing to try and shut people up who were mocking claudes code, but also potentially because it’d found govt-placed backdoors that they wanted the gov to know were about to be exposed / patched. The USA’s alleged ability to “shut off” tech assets during raids in Venezuela and Iran, gets trickier if AI is exposing their back doors. Likely also why the US Administration is now saying they want to review AIs before they get released. Mythos definitely isn’t the only game in town for this sort of stuff – but the general idea that the dev teams will be shifting to using these tools for QA / writing more secure apps in the near future, is fairly valid. So I wouldn’t go too tinfoil hat-y on that front… though it is a period where we’ll see a need to patch aggressively, and to double check security configs etc.
The Mozilla numbers are wildly inflated. They were effectively just advertising for Anthropic’s mediocre LLM with that blog post.
Eh, fair enough – doesn’t really change the underlying concept though.
if somebody has user access to your computer, they are already 95% there, so I am not worried about these priv escalation part of the last 5%
If you refer to physical access I wouldn’t say that, I’ve encrypted partition.
But if you’re saying just access to my main user inside the OS, then I’d really like if you could elaborate with real examples how can user access do any harm to my system without root access. Real examples please not speculation or theory. Something I can run here right away to see by myself.
Your user account can run applications and read and write to a lot of locations on the disk.
So it can be used to run malware (cryptominers, ransomware, RATs etc.) Exfiltrate the data your account has access to, download or plant malicious or illegal data, use your internet connection to attack other systems with DOS or similar, use any logged in social media accounts to attack or spam your contacts, steal saved passwords and credentials from your web browsers, use your peripherals or connected devices (printers cameras microphone speakers), pivot to access other services on your local network (smart devices, IoT, TVs, home lab) etc.
There are comparatively few things an attacker wants on a desktop that actually require root access. It’s mostly just system files, package management and settings changes that require root to mess with. Eg. You would need root to dump a shadow file or stuff like luks encryption keys from kernel memory, but if an attacker has your logged in user account, the disk is already decrypted and account is already logged in.
Most systems also use single user, you normally give yourself docker group access (I use docker for work) and that alone is equivalent to root access. It’s not the 90s anymore where universities gave user access to all students, priv escalation was a big security threat, now it almost doesn’t mean anything, nobody shares the same machine anymore the way they used to do.
Yes kinda? It depends a lot on the system. It’s still pretty common, even with containers like docker, for different services to run with different accounts and permissions. Eg. If you have a webapp with a small database or something, the web server will be
www-dataor whatever and the db will be a different user account like apostgresuser or something. Even a fresh Linux install will have a separate user account for things likentp(orsystemd-timesync) etc. Users aren’t usually people, they’re daemons with limited scope and rule of least privilege.Even if it’s all docker containers and you deploy them with the same docker account on the host, there are almost certainly a bunch of different accounts inside.
That way if there’s some vulnerability in ntp or something, an attacker might have permission to mess with the time but can’t, in theory, take over the whole container.
I think there is a trend towards caring less about that aspect of defence in depth if each service is in its own container and just rely on isolation. People are deploying services running as root with ansible or even just in dockerfiles, and not caring about it because there’s nothing else on the box for an attacker anyway. If they compromise the service, they’ve already got what they want.
I get the thought process but it still doesn’t feel good to me. If some docker bug shows up that allows a container user with root to break isolation and use the shared kernel to pivot to the host or other containers, then that one dodgy webapp that’s not running as a restricted user can become a part of a larger kill chain. It’s really easy to develop systems with least privilege in mind and there’s not much downside to doing it. It’s a good habit to create different accounts for different services (even if there’s one admin/docker/ansible/whatever account for deployment).
For me the scariest thing someone could do on my pc is exfiltrate all the data from my home directory which is readable by my user account.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but that’s harm to me without root access.
Does this affect immutable distros like Bazzite?
Funny that just after Microsoft commits suicide with Winders 11, Linux “exploits” start popping up like Whack-A-Moles. Makes one wonder if they were inserted by MS engineers.
Nah, people just started using LLM assisted vuln discovery workflows and having early successes with them.
There will be diminishing returns.
We’re living through the Linux’ enshittification era
Not really. Proprietary software have just as many if not more vulnerabilities. Linux is just more honest and open about reporting them so it seems like they have more.
Linux also shows up more in CVE databases etc because many distributions also assign their own CVEs for the same bugs.
I feel like you don’t even know what enshittification is.
The vulnerability has been there for years so if it’s enshittified it has been for years as well.
How is finding vulnerabilities and patching them enshittification?
