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As someone who has been using linux quite happily on the desktop for more than 20 years now, I have to say it remains an eternal experiment, feature wise as well as security wise.
If you think Linux is an experiment, you should see the other OSes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Local root privilege escalation is mostly irrelevant these days. It’s only useful as part of an exploit chain, really. It’s not like shell servers are still around.
An exploit chain, like combining it with the PAM issue they mentioned in the very same article, affecting Fedora.
What the parent poster meant is that you first need a way to run arbitrary code before local privilege escalation matters, so the exploit chain has to include _something_ that gets you local code execution.
I tend to agree with the parent poster, for most modern single-user linux devices, local privilege escalation means almost nothing.
Like, I'm the only user on my laptop. If you get arbitrary code execution as my user, you can log my keystrokes, steal my passwords and browser sessions, steal my bitcoin wallet, and persist reasonably well.... and once you've stolen my password via say keylogging me typing `sudo`, you now have root too.
If you have a local privilege escalation too, you still get my passwords, bitcoin wallet, etc, and also uh... you can persist yourself better by injecting malware into sshd or something or modifying my package manager? idk, seems like it's about the same.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Local root privilege escalation is mostly irrelevant these days. It’s only useful as part of an exploit chain, really. It’s not like shell servers are still around.
An exploit chain, like combining it with the PAM issue they mentioned in the very same article, affecting Fedora.
As someone who has been using linux quite happily on the desktop for more than 20 years now, I have to say it remains an eternal experiment, feature wise as well as security wise.
Fixed two weeks ago (in Debian at least).
As someone who has been using linux quite happily on the desktop for more than 20 years now, I have to say it remains an eternal experiment, feature wise as well as security wise.
Local root privilege escalation is mostly irrelevant these days. It’s only useful as part of an exploit chain, really. It’s not like shell servers are still around.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An exploit chain, like combining it with the PAM issue they mentioned in the very same article, affecting Fedora.
The article was about two issues that combine to make a single local-privilege-escalation, so the PAM thing isn't a separate exploit chain, it's just part of getting local root in this vulnerability. What the parent poster meant is that you first need a way to run arbitrary code before local privilege escalation matters, so the exploit chain has to include _something_ that gets you local code execution. I tend to agr…
I haven't actually looked at the numbers, but I strongly suspect that it's true that the overwhelming majority of single-user Linux devices out there are Android devices. If that's true, then it's my understanding that Android does bother to fairly properly sandbox programs from each other... so an escalation to root would actually be a significant gain in access.