Comment by MarleTangible
18 hours ago
Seems like distros consider it a medium risk because it doesn't involve remote code execution and requires local access. Though it allows local root privilege escalation which is considered high priority.
https://ubuntu.com/security/cves/about#priority
> Medium: A significant problem, typically exploitable for many users. Includes network daemon denial of service, cross-site scripting, and gaining user privileges.
Strange that it's not classified as "high", which specifically includes "local root privilege escalations".
> High: A significant problem, typically exploitable for nearly all users in a default installation of Ubuntu. Includes serious remote denial of service, local root privilege escalations, local data theft, and data loss.
It is high now, someone at canonical is paying attention it seems
if your model is that linux is just about single-user desktops, this local exploit isn't too bad. or if your model is nothing but DB servers or the like.
mystifying to me that shared, multi-user machines are not thought of. for instance, I administer a system with 27k users - people who can login. even if only 1/10,000 of them are curious/malicious/compromised, we (Canadian national research HPC systems) are at risk. yes, this is somewhat uncommon these days, when shell access is not the norm.
but consider the very common sort of shared hosting environment: they typically provide something like plesk to interface to shared machines with no particular isolation. can you (as a website owner or 0wner) convince wordpress/etc to drop and execute a script? yep.
Not to bad? So we just threat linux overall as a single user system or what?
> if your model is that linux is just about single-user desktops, this local exploit isn't too bad.
For example, if you have passwordless sudo, you've already got a widely known LPE vulnerability lurking on your system.
Only for your user, and it means a keylogger on the system if it gets rooted can't pull your password to try on other machines. Personally I always either login as root or use passwordless sudo.
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hmm have i missed anything?
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Local access is a bit of a misnomer though, a vulnerable website can be tricked into running a script
Ubuntu seems to have updated the page to say that it's a high priority now.
it's not like this couldn't be chained with some other exploit to get remote access to get remote root access which seems like a bit of an issue