OVERVIEW



Kernel logging daemon klogd in the sysklogd package for Linux contains a

"format bug" making it vulnerable to local root compromise (successfully

tested on Linux/x86). There's also a possibility for remote vulnerability

under certain (rather unprobable)  circumstances and a more probable

semi-remote exploitableness with knfsd.







BUG DETAILS



Normally klogd reads kernel messages from /proc/kmsg and after some

processing passes them to syslogd, which in turn writes the messages to

log file(s) as defined in syslog.conf.



The erroneous function calls are located in function LogLine(), klogd.c

lines 680 and 707:



                Syslog( LOG_INFO, line_buff );



Each newline-postfixed kernel message goes to Syslog() as a format

string. Before passing the string to Syslog(), the LogLine() function

does some simple processing. Kernel addresses of form [
] are

translated to symbol names and '%' chars are checked and duplicated to

avoid format problems. The logics however fail to handle %-symbols

inside a [] symbol marker, so a malicious user can forge a kernel

message like "[<%s %s %s %s>]" which would be enough to kill klogd with

a segmentation fault. Possibilities of executing arbitrary code are

discussed below.









EXPLOITATION POSSIBILITIES



The vulnerability is exploitable for anyone who can feed strings in the 

kernel log. There are many ways to do this locally; for example a 

connect() call with an improperly initialized sockaddr structure

generates a warning to the kernel log containing the program name.

However the program name is taken from task_struct->comm which is a

16-byte buffer. The required "[<" takes 2 bytes so the space gets short

for a conventional shellcode and return address. The warning is printed

only once so exploiting with just this message is probably difficult, but

other warnings in the kernel make it possible.



Other possibilities include special kernel modules that call printk() to

log their things to kernel log, or various device  drivers. The driver for

/dev/mixer for instance can be trivially made log a string containing a

31-byte user defineable substring if /dev/mixer is openable (as it is per

default in many systems).



The exploitation process itself isn't so trivial. The buffer in question

is declared static so it's mapped to a low memory address; there's

nothing user-defineable or otherwise usable in stack. I haven't been able

to produce a program doing a standard "%n" exploitation, but it is

possible to create a buffer overflow condition elsewhere in the program

in conjunction with the format bug. If the format string contains

something like "%2000d", a local buffer in vsyslog() overflows. This

function is called from Syslog() and does no bound checking but trusts

Syslog() checks. In addition, "%m" in the format string expands to the

error message (from strerror()) which can be used to "push" the end of

the string further in the memory, making it possible to build a longer

shellcode using multiple klogd messages if needed.



According to my quick test with a knfsd-enabled system, the driver can be

tricked to printk() path names with some race conditioning, which is

probably one of the easiest exploit methods where available.







VENDOR PATCHES



Linux distribution vendors have been informed about the problem via

vendor-sec@lst.de a week ago; patches and advisories will be out today.







CREDITS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS



Vulnerability discovered by:

     Jouko Pynnönen



Greets and thanks to:

     Esa Etelävuori, vendor-sec team, cc-opers@IRCNet