Unprivileged Linux Users With UID > INT_MAX Can Execute Any Command [thehackernews]
by CIRT Team
A low-privileged user account on most Linux operating systems with UID value anything greater than 2147483647 can execute any systemctl command unauthorizedly—thanks to a newly discovered vulnerability.
The reported vulnerability actually resides in PolicyKit (also known as polkit)—an application-level toolkit for Unix-like operating systems that defines policies, handles system-wide privileges and provides a way for non-privileged processes to communicate with privileged ones, such as “sudo,” that does not grant root permission to an entire process.
The issue, tracked as CVE-2018-19788, impacts PolicyKit version 0.115 which comes pre-installed on most popular Linux distributions, including Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, and CentOS.
The vulnerability exists due to PolicyKit’s improper validation of permission requests for any low-privileged user with UID greater than INT_MAX.
Where, INT_MAX is a constant in computer programming that defines what maximum value an integer variable can store, which equals to 2147483647 (in hexadecimal 0x7FFFFFFF).
So it means, if you create a user account on affected Linux systems with any UID greater than INT_MAX value, the PolicyKit component will allow you to execute any systemctl command successfully.
Security researcher Rich Mirch, Twitter handle “0xm1rch,” has also released a proof-of-concept(PoC) exploit to successfully demonstrate the vulnerability that requires a user with the UID 4000000000.
For more, click here.
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