![]() So these days it’s relatively rare to find a vulnerability that doesn’t require coding skills to exploit. Most modern exploits involve complicated trickery, like using a memory corruption vulnerability to forge fake objects in the heap, or replacing a file with a symlink with microsecond accuracy to exploit a TOCTOU vulnerability. I have, on some occasions, written thousands of lines of code to exploit a vulnerability. It’s unusual for a vulnerability on a modern operating system to be this easy to exploit. I have made a short demo video, to show how easy it is. With a few simple commands in the terminal, and a few mouse clicks, a standard user can create an administrator account for themselves. This blog post is about an astonishingly straightforward way to escalate privileges on Ubuntu. In other words, I don’t want this blog post to give you the impression that Ubuntu is full of trivial security bugs that’s not been my impression so far. Ubuntu is open source, which means that many people have looked at the source code before me, and it seems like all the easy bugs have already been found. ![]() I have found (and reported) a few issues, but the majority have been low severity. I have recently spent quite a bit of time looking for security vulnerabilities in Ubuntu’s system services, and it has mostly been an exercise in frustration. ![]() ![]() I am a fan of Ubuntu, so I would like to help make it as secure as possible. NovemHow to get root on Ubuntu 20.04 by pretending nobody’s /home Kevin Backhouse
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