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New Linux udisks flaw lets attackers get root on major Linux distros

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Re: New Linux udisks flaw lets attackers get root on major Linux distros

#121

Post by johnisgood »

tormeh wrote: post #87
pona-a wrote: post #54

udisks, not counting its dependencies, has 265,334 LoC. pmount, in contrast, has 19,978 LoC, or >13x less. sudo, another setuid binary with a lot of policy code, has 210 CVEs / 430.150 kLoC = ~0.5 CVE per kLoC. 57.5% of CVEs have a CVSS >= 7, so 0.5 * 0.575 = 0.2875 CVE7/kLoC. As a back-of-envelope estimate, udisks: 0.2875 CVE7/kLoC * 265.334 kLoC = ~76.28 critical CVEs; pmount: 0.2875 CVE7/kLoC * 19.9780 kLoC = ~5.7…

Ubuntu is switching to a Rust implementation of sudo: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-25.10-sudo-rs-Default Repo here: https://github.com/trifectatechfoundation/sudo-rs It's permissively licensed, unfortunately. Wonder why. It's not a library. But it ought to improve security in the long run.

Do they not think that the switching is premature? I am pretty sure the Rust version has a lot of logic bugs that not have yet been found.

Re: New Linux udisks flaw lets attackers get root on major Linux distros

#122

Post by jcranmer »

scheeseman486 wrote: post #96
stephenr wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's permissively licensed, unfortunately. Well damn that's a shame. I just hate it when people let others use their work in a way they choose, that happens to be less restrictive than my own personal choices. /s of course.

Worked out for Linux, which remains a largely open, collaborative ecosystem. Meanwhile all the BSDs are good for are as less-good Linuxes that can be shoved into proprietary products. Google is choking out AOSP, which they can do because of Android's "less restrictive" license. Copyleft licenses are demonstrably better for open source projects in the long run. We've had enough time to prove that out now.

The success of Linux over BSD has more to do with a lawsuit in the early 90's over whether or BSD infringed on Unix's source code, which made Linux the only viable open source Unix-like operating systems if you had to ask a legal department the question.

Look beyond the OS, and much of the tech stack is dominated by non-copyleft open source projects. Both the major web servers--Apache and nginx--are permissively licensed, for example. Your SSL stacks are largely permissively licensed; indeed, most protocol servers seem to me to largely be permissively licensed rather than copyleft.

And I should also point out a clear example where copyleft has hobbled an ecosystem: Clang and LLVM have ignited a major compiler-based ecosystem of ancillary tools for development such as language servers. The gcc response to this is... to basically do nothing, because tight integration of the compiler into other components might allow workarounds that release the precious goodness of gcc to proprietary software, and Stallman has resisted letting emacs join in this revolution because he doesn't want a dependency on non-copyleft software. An extra cruel irony is that Clang appears to be an existential threat to the proprietary EDG compiler toolchain, which would mean it took a permissive license to do what the goal of the copyleft license was in the first place: kill proprietary software.

Re: New Linux udisks flaw lets attackers get root on major Linux distros

#123

Post by uncircle »

PhilipRoman wrote: post #57

Local privesc, don't care. If anyone still thinks that they can draw a security boundary anywhere with a shared kernel, they should really look at kernel CVE database (and be horrified). For every fancy titled exploit there are twenty that you've never heard of. You can sort of do it if you carefully structure your program to restrict syscall use and then use some minimal and well audited syscall filtering layer to h…

https://xkcd.com/1200/

Re: New Linux udisks flaw lets attackers get root on major Linux distros

#125

Post by throw0101b »

uncircle wrote: post #119
8fingerlouie wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big part of the difference is that the BSDs are designed by a governing committee. They usually don't have 15 different solutions for the same problem, but instead 2-3 solutions that work well. Take filesystems, the official filesystems are UFS(1/2) and ZFS. They have GEOM as LVM and LUKS and more. That being said, the majority of money and development goes into Linux, which by itself may make it a better system (e…

> A big part of the difference is that the BSDs are designed by a governing committee While I cannot agree nor disagree on the quality of BSDs (haven't used one in 20 years), I find it funny that in this case a design by committee is proof of quality. I guess it's better than design by headless chicken which is how the Linux user-space is developed. Personally, I am a big fan of design by dictatorship, where one guy…

> While I cannot agree nor disagree on the quality of BSDs (haven't used one in 20 years), I find it funny that in this case a design by committee is proof of quality.

I don't think "design" is correct word: organized, managed, or ran perhaps.

> The FreeBSD Project is run by FreeBSD committers, or developers who have direct commit access to the master Git repository.[1] The FreeBSD Core Team exists to provide direction and is responsible for setting goals for the FreeBSD Project and to provide mediation in the event of disputes, and also takes the final decision in case of disagreement between individuals and teams involved in the project.[2]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_Core_Team

There is no BDFL, à la Linux or formerly Python: it's a 'board of directors'. Decisions are mostly dispute / policy-focused, and less technical for a particular bit of code.

Re: New Linux udisks flaw lets attackers get root on major Linux distros

#126

Post by SoftTalker »

Asooka wrote: post #118
bapak wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's incredible to me that sudo has that many LoC. I'd assume it would just ask the OS to execute something without restrictions, not have any logic to do so itself.

There is no such API on Linux, it is accomplished by sudo having the setuid bit set, which instructs the kernel to start it as root regardless of the current user. It's probably one of the worst legacy designs still in use - if any binary has setuid set, it runs as root, no questions asked. Conversely, you also have no way of elevating privileges for a running binary. This really should have been solved decades ago w…

> if any binary has setuid set, it runs as root

More precisely, it runs as the file owner. Which is often root.

Re: New Linux udisks flaw lets attackers get root on major Linux distros

#127

Post by faceplanted »

johnisgood wrote: post #121
tormeh wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu is switching to a Rust implementation of sudo: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-25.10-sudo-rs-Default Repo here: https://github.com/trifectatechfoundation/sudo-rs It's permissively licensed, unfortunately. Wonder why. It's not a library. But it ought to improve security in the long run.

Do they not think that the switching is premature? I am pretty sure the Rust version has a lot of logic bugs that not have yet been found.

> I am pretty sure the Rust version has a lot of logic bugs

What makes you say that? I'm not trying to be argumentative, I'm genuinely interested.

Re: New Linux udisks flaw lets attackers get root on major Linux distros

#128

Post by mathverse »

IlikeKitties wrote: post #83
mathverse wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No the closest alternative is https://grsecurity.net/

Factually wrong from that very site > grsecurity® is the only drop-in Linux kernel replacement offering high-performance, state-of-the-art exploit prevention against both known and unknown threats. While secureblue is a full desktop distro (not just a kernel) that integrates key grapheneos hardening tools like their hardened malloc and forks of their hardened chromium and works with flatpak as a base for hardened app…

Yes grsecurity offers actual hardening instead of touting snakeoil.

Re: New Linux udisks flaw lets attackers get root on major Linux distros

#129

Post by anthk »

graemep wrote: post #78
jeltz wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the BSDs are much more different from each other than the average Linux distros are.

Average/most popular distros, maybe. The full range of distros are very different from each other. Consider Void, Alpine, Gentoo, Chimera, NixOS..... Different C libraries, init systems, different default command line utilities....

That's nothing. Alpine can run Glibc binaries with compat libraries.

Try running a FreeBSD binary under OpenBSD.

Re: New Linux udisks flaw lets attackers get root on major Linux distros

#130

Post by lukaslalinsky »

commandersaki wrote: post #88
bapak wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's incredible to me that sudo has that many LoC. I'd assume it would just ask the OS to execute something without restrictions, not have any logic to do so itself.

I think it's all the stuff to do with using a shared sudoers across a network of hosts. They could really clean up the language if they removed all of that gunk, as it's not reflective of how sudo is deployed these days.

Even these days, I don't like having deployment SSH keys, or anything of that nature, unless the users are sudo-restricted. You might say that's obsolete in today's world of kubernetes/clouds, but there are many many use cases not met by these things and even for the clouds, someone needs to run them.
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