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From 65c88a43a23c2391dcc90c0abda3e839e9c57904 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Alejandro Colomar <alx@kernel.org>
Date: Sat, 10 Jun 2023 16:20:05 +0200
Subject: [PATCH] gpasswd(1): Fix password leak
How to trigger this password leak?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When gpasswd(1) asks for the new password, it asks twice (as is usual
for confirming the new password). Each of those 2 password prompts
uses agetpass() to get the password. If the second agetpass() fails,
the first password, which has been copied into the 'static' buffer
'pass' via STRFCPY(), wasn't being zeroed.
agetpass() is defined in <./libmisc/agetpass.c> (around line 91), and
can fail for any of the following reasons:
- malloc(3) or readpassphrase(3) failure.
These are going to be difficult to trigger. Maybe getting the system
to the limits of memory utilization at that exact point, so that the
next malloc(3) gets ENOMEM, and possibly even the OOM is triggered.
About readpassphrase(3), ENFILE and EINTR seem the only plausible
ones, and EINTR probably requires privilege or being the same user;
but I wouldn't discard ENFILE so easily, if a process starts opening
files.
- The password is longer than PASS_MAX.
The is plausible with physical access. However, at that point, a
keylogger will be a much simpler attack.
And, the attacker must be able to know when the second password is being
introduced, which is not going to be easy.
How to read the password after the leak?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Provoking the leak yourself at the right point by entering a very long
password is easy, and inspecting the process stack at that point should
be doable. Try to find some consistent patterns.
Then, search for those patterns in free memory, right after the victim
leaks their password.
Once you get the leak, a program should read all the free memory
searching for patterns that gpasswd(1) leaves nearby the leaked
password.
On 6/10/23 03:14, Seth Arnold wrote:
> An attacker process wouldn't be able to use malloc(3) for this task.
> There's a handful of tools available for userspace to allocate memory:
>
> - brk / sbrk
> - mmap MAP_ANONYMOUS
> - mmap /dev/zero
> - mmap some other file
> - shm_open
> - shmget
>
> Most of these return only pages of zeros to a process. Using mmap of an
> existing file, you can get some of the contents of the file demand-loaded
> into the memory space on the first use.
>
> The MAP_UNINITIALIZED flag only works if the kernel was compiled with
> CONFIG_MMAP_ALLOW_UNINITIALIZED. This is rare.
>
> malloc(3) doesn't zero memory, to our collective frustration, but all the
> garbage in the allocations is from previous allocations in the current
> process. It isn't leftover from other processes.
>
> The avenues available for reading the memory:
> - /dev/mem and /dev/kmem (requires root, not available with Secure Boot)
> - /proc/pid/mem (requires ptrace privileges, mediated by YAMA)
> - ptrace (requires ptrace privileges, mediated by YAMA)
> - causing memory to be swapped to disk, and then inspecting the swap
>
> These all require a certain amount of privileges.
How to fix it?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
memzero(), which internally calls explicit_bzero(3), or whatever
alternative the system provides with a slightly different name, will
make sure that the buffer is zeroed in memory, and optimizations are not
allowed to impede this zeroing.
This is not really 100% effective, since compilers may place copies of
the string somewhere hidden in the stack. Those copies won't get zeroed
by explicit_bzero(3). However, that's arguably a compiler bug, since
compilers should make everything possible to avoid optimizing strings
that are later passed to explicit_bzero(3). But we all know that
sometimes it's impossible to have perfect knowledge in the compiler, so
this is plausible. Nevertheless, there's nothing we can do against such
issues, except minimizing the time such passwords are stored in plain
text.
Security concerns
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We believe this isn't easy to exploit. Nevertheless, and since the fix
is trivial, this fix should probably be applied soon, and backported to
all supported distributions, to prevent someone else having more
imagination than us to find a way.
Affected versions
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
All. Bug introduced in shadow 19990709. That's the second commit in
the git history.
Fixes: 45c6603cc86c ("[svn-upgrade] Integrating new upstream version, shadow (19990709)")
Reported-by: Alejandro Colomar <alx@kernel.org>
Cc: Serge Hallyn <serge@hallyn.com>
Cc: Iker Pedrosa <ipedrosa@redhat.com>
Cc: Seth Arnold <seth.arnold@canonical.com>
Cc: Christian Brauner <christian@brauner.io>
Cc: Balint Reczey <rbalint@debian.org>
Cc: Sam James <sam@gentoo.org>
Cc: David Runge <dvzrv@archlinux.org>
Cc: Andreas Jaeger <aj@suse.de>
Cc: <~hallyn/shadow@lists.sr.ht>
Signed-off-by: Alejandro Colomar <alx@kernel.org>
---
src/gpasswd.c | 1 +
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
--- a/src/gpasswd.c
+++ b/src/gpasswd.c
@@ -896,6 +896,7 @@
strzero (cp);
cp = getpass (_("Re-enter new password: "));
if (NULL == cp) {
+ memzero (pass, sizeof pass);
exit (1);
}
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