On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 6:32 PM, Warren Young wyml@etr-usa.com wrote:
Most such vulns are against Apache, PHP, etc, which do not run as root.
Those are common. Combine them with anything called a 'local privilege escalation' vulnerability and you've got a remote root exploit.
Not quite. An LPE can only be used against your system by logged-in users.
Or any running program - like a web server.
To make a blended attack that can read /etc/shadow from an LPE, you need either SSH access or a remote shell vuln, not an arbitrary file read vuln. Holes that expose an unintended remote shell are quite a bit rarer than ones that allow a service like Apache to send you any file their non-root account has permission to read.
It’s a bit like calling lightning to find a system where both types of vulnerabilities are available at the same time.
No, you exploit the server application hole to tell you about the kernel vulnerability. The last one I saw in the wild involved the symlink race in the kernel around centos 5.2 or .3 and a struts java library bug. But there are people who know what combinations of vulnerabilities to try.