Comment by markhahn
9 hours ago
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.
Yubikeys are also surprisingly annoying when setup for the as well. A working developer just needs sudo a lot.
Realistically a "sudo button" would be handy, on the keyboard, with a display to show a confirmation pin for the request (probably also needs a deny button so you can try and identify weird ones).
hmm have i missed anything?
Any program on your computer can just run "sudo" to escalate itself.