The recent CVE-2010-2961 mountall vulnerability got a nice write-up by xorl today. I’ve seen a few public exploits for it, but those that I’ve seen, including the one in xorl’s post, miss a rather important point: udev events can be triggered by regular users without any hardware fiddling. While the bug that kept udev from running inotify correctly on the /dev/.udev/rules.d directory during initial boot kept this vulnerability exposure pretty well minimized, the fact that udev events can be triggered at will made it pretty bad too. If udev had already been restarted, an attacker didn’t have to wait at all, nor have physical access to the system.
While it is generally understood that udev events are related to hardware, it’s important to keep in mind that it also sends events on module loads, and module loads can happen on demand from unprivileged users. For example, say you want to send an X.25 packet, when you call socket(AF_X25, SOCK_STREAM), the kernel will go load net-pf-9, which modules.alias lists as the x25 module. And once loaded, udev sends a “module” event.
(Which, by the way, should serve as a reminder to people to block module loading if you can.)
So, as I mentioned, here’s yet another exploit for the mountall vulnerability: mountall-CVE-2010-2961.py. It writes to the vulnerable udev rule file and then attempts to trigger udev immediately by walking a list of possible socket() AF_* types.
© 2010, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.