On 06/18/2017 12:56 AM, David Bunch wrote:
Hi,
I'm not sure where or how or even if i should submit a bug small security
vulnerability in the default .profile that is created in each users home
directory.
.profile searches for a ~/bin directory and if it finds it prepends it to
PATH like so: PATH='$HOME/bin':$PATH
This could be a potential security vulnerability because if the user account
of a uesr with 'su' power, an attacker could place a malicious 'su', 'ls',
and 'which' in their ~/bin directory which could give an attacker the root
password when the user runs the 'su' command.
A safer configuration would be PATH=$PATH:'$HOME/bin'.
This way if malicious copies of systems programs were placed in the user's
~/bin directory the uncompromised system copies would be still be run.
Kind regards,
-David Bunch
That's interesting. I didn't know there was a difference but now that I
look at it, I think you're right. In Jessie, I had to set this manually
in ~/.bashrc because it didn't work out of the box for some reason.
Then again, I do not create a directory called ~/bin but instead it's a
symlink to another subdirectory inside a subdirectory in my $HOME
because of the way I like to arrange things. That probably was why it
didn't work for me out of the box in "Jessie"? I'll have to test that in
Stretch.