Re: Closing a privilege escalation

[Søren Pilgård]

On Wed, Apr 25, 2018 at 6:47 PM, Glenn Morris <address@hidden> wrote:

This was previously discussed in bug#28618.
I think the discussion suffers from lack of a clear example, so let me
try to give one:

A normal (uncompromised) user account inadvertently installs a malicious
Emacs package that contains exploit code that waits to be run as root.

This user then sudos (to root) in such a way that HOME is not reset to
that of root. They then run Emacs, which executes the malicious package
code as root.

This entire class of exploit can be avoided by suitable sudo options
(always_set_home etc), but that doesn't necessarily mean that Emacs
should not do something about it.

It seems to me, that "if UID = 0, set user-init-file, user-emacs-directory
etc to those of root" is a simpler solution that the one you propose.

This effectively enforces the always_set_home feature of sudo in Emacs.
This may annoy some people, but you can't make the behaviour optional,
because then the bad code could disable it. Some might say that people
using sudo without set_home want the behaviour the way it is now, but
maybe we could argue that it is not always a conscious choice.

By the way, what about sudo called from Tramp? Let's suppose the
malicious package subverts the sudo syntax that is built-in to Emacs.
How to defend against that (ie people running sudo within Emacs)?

If a clever hacker is able to run code on your computer as your account he could just install a fake sudo program that snatches the password. And then modify the path in your .bashrc etc. to execute this script instead of the build in.