[CentOS] Re: centos] GSM back door to shell with Centos and Palm handhelds

On Tue, 8 Aug 2006, J.J. Garcia wrote:

> First, this motorolla has an usb interface to the host, it's quite
> simple to attach the phone to the host running CentOs, i dont like very
> much usb 'things' but things are like this... anyway, if you do so

> Then, in /dev you will have:
>
> [root at spoolbox crash]# l /dev/ttyACM0
> crw-------  1 root root 166, 0 ago  8 20:54 /dev/ttyACM0

yes - USB devices are nasty, and the PPPD has to manage serial 
devices as root.

Pretty definitionally, one has to have physical access to a 
host to plug a USB device into it -- the site admin (at least 
in the BIOS' I have deployed commercially) can, but may not 
have chosen to, disable USB devices, non-hard drive boot 
devices, etc., and so a local (mis)configuration may result in 
escalated privs.

Of course the admin may not have put a cable lock through the 
Kensington lock port, or an end user could bash in a plastic 
dress plate to pull out a HD and mount it on a nearby box with 
a live CD, even if the admin did.

Remote roots are interesting; local accounts escalation less 
so; physically available hosts not so much.

It was a fun report to see, and I would encourage upstreaming 
it to Red Hat.

- Russ Herrold