ConectarThis Week in Security: The Geopolitical Kernel, Roundcube, and The Archive
Leading off the week is the controversy around the Linux kernel and an unexpected change in maintainership. The exact change was that over a dozen developers with ties to or employment by Russian entities were removed as maintainers. The unfortunate thing about this patch was that it was merged without any discussion or real explanation, other than being “due to various compliance requirements”. We eventually got more answers, that this was due to US sanctions against certain Russian businesses, and that the Linux Foundation lawyers gave guidance that:
If your company is on the U.S. OFAC SDN lists, subject to an OFAC sanctions program, or owned/controlled by a company on the list, our ability to collaborate with you will be subject to restrictions, and you cannot be in the MAINTAINERS file.
So that’s that. One might observe that it’s unfortunate that a single government has that much control over the kernel’s development process. There were some questions about why Russian entities were targeted and not sanctioned Chinese companies like Huawei. [Ted Ts’o] spoke to that, explaining that in the US there are exemptions and different rules for each country and business. This was all fairly standard compliance stuff, up until a very surprising statement from [James Bottomley], a very core Kernel maintainer:
We are hoping that this action alone will be sufficient to satisfy the US Treasury department in charge of sanctions and we won’t also have to remove any existing patches.
I can only conclude from this that the US Treasury has in fact made this threat, that code would need to be removed. Now this is genuinely surprising, given the legal precedent that code is 1st Amendment protected speech. That precedent was established when dealing with encryption code that was being export restricted in the 90s. It seems particularly problematic that the US government believes it can specify what code does and does not belong in the Linux kernel.
SELinux
Since we’re in Kernel land, let’s talk SELinux. Many modern Linux systems, and Android in particular, use SELinux to provide an extra security layer. It’s not an uncommon troubleshooting step, to turn off SELinux to see if that helps with mysterious issues. What we have here in the klecko Blog is an intro to bypassing SELinux. The setup is that an exploit has achieved root, but is in a unprivileged context. What options does an attacker have to try to bypass SELinux?
The first, most obvious solution is to just disable SELinux altogether. If you can write to memory, the SELinux enabled bit can just be set to false. But that might not work, if you can’t write to memory, or have a hypervisor to wrestle with, like some Android systems. Another option is the set of permissive flags that can be overwritten, or the AVC cache that can be poisoned, both approaches resulting in every SELinux request being approved. It’s an interesting overview.
Printer Root
Xerox printers with the “Network Troubleshooting” feature have some unintended hidden functionality. The troubleshooting is done by calling tcpdump as root, and the configuration allows setting the IP address to use for the troubleshooting process. And as you might expect, that IP address was used to create a command line string, and it isn’t properly escaped. You can sneak a $(bash ...) in as part of the address, allowing code execution. The good news is that access to this troubleshooting function is locked behind the web admin account. Xerox has made fixed firmware available for this issue.
Fix Your Roundcube
The Roundcube email web client has a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability that is actively being exploited. The flaw is the processing of SVGs, and the addition of an extra space in an href tag, that the browser ignores. Sneaking this inside an SVG allows for arbitrary Javascript to run when opening this malicious email.
Roundcube has released 1.5.7 and 1.6.7 that address the issue. This is under active exploitation, currently being used against the Russian aligned CIS countries. It’s a simple exploit, so expect to see it more widely used soon.
The Archive
The Internet Archive continues to be under siege. The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks were apparently done by SN-Blackmeta. But the hacker behind the data breach is still a mystery. But the news this week is that there is still someone with access to Internet Archive API keys. Specifically Zendesk, illustrated by the fact that when Mashable reached out via email, the hacker answered, “It’s dispiriting to see that even after being made aware of the breach 2 weeks ago, IA has still not done the due diligence of rotating many of the API keys that were exposed in their gitlab secrets.”
It’s obviously been a terrible, horrible, no good, and very bad month for the Internet Archive. As it’s such an important resource, we’re hoping for some additional support, and getting the service back to 100%.
Quantum Errata
You may remember last week, that we talked about a Quantum Annealing machine making progress on solving RSA cryptography. In the comments, it was pointed out that some coverage on this talks about RSA, and some talks about AES, a cryptography thought to be quantum-resistant. At least one source is claiming that this confusion is because there were actually two papers from the same team, one discussing RSA, and the other techniques that could be used against AES. This isn’t confirmed yet, and there are outstanding questions about both papers.
Bits and Bytes
SQL injection attacks are old hat by this point. [NastyStereo] has an interesting idea: Polyglot SQL injection attacks. The idea is simple. A SQL query might be escapable with a single quote or a double quote. To test it, just include both: OR 1#"OR"'OR''='"="'OR''='. There are more examples and some analysis at the link.
Kaspersky researchers found a Chrome exploit, that was being delivered in the form of an online tank battle game. In reality, the game was stolen from its original developers, and the web site was a crypto stealing scam, making use of the browser 0-day. This campaign has been pinned on Lazarus, the APT from North Korea.
And yet another example of fake software, researchers at kandji discovered a fake Cloudflare Authenticator campaign. This one is a MacOS malware dropper that does a reasonably good job of looking like it’s an official Cloudflare app. It’s malware, and places itself in the system crontab, to get launched on every boot. Follow the link for Indicators of Compromise if you need them.
