Hi Paul I discovered it by accident, and well you are right about bugs for privilege escalation. But this is not a bug, it is a feature that can be used for privilege escalation. I did google around and as you said it is barely known. I can see the benefits of the feature, to see live changes in traffic shapping by executing different traffic shapping scripts through the commad prompts and seeing the results.
For my own needs, I will remove the deb package and recompile from source.
Regards
On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 9:24 PM, Paul Warren pdw@ex-parrot.com wrote:
Ali,
On 18 Jan 2010, at 16:35, Ali Jawad wrote:
As you all know a non root user can not run iftop. So the most obvious
workaround is to use sudo. Now if you give a regular user sudo access he will execute.
sudo iftop
Once he is inside iftop. He can execute ! he will get the following promtp
command >
I have to say, I'd completely forgotten that that feature existed!
At this point a user can execute su, and he will get a root shell. He can
also execute any command in privileged mode. The idea of using sudo initially was giving the user iftop access. However the user ends up with total root access.
Indeed.
There are two answers to this. The first is that although this provides the user with a very direct and simple way of getting a shell, I would not warrant that there are not bugs in either iftop or any of it's library dependencies that can be exploited to give privilege escalation. This applies to just about any non-trivial program that you may wish to make available via sudo.
The second answer is that there's a compile-time option to disable this functionality (which I'd also forgotten about, but the change log claims it was introduced in 0.17).
I can't remember exactly how to use it, but something like:
export CFLAGS=-DNO_SYSTEMthen rebuilding may do what you want.
Paul