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Major Security Hole In Samsung Linux Drivers
GerbilSoft writes with news of a major security hole in Samsung's proprietary Linux printer drivers. From the Ubuntu Forums: "Just to inform you about a recent post on the French Ubuntu forum about Samsung drivers (sorry, in French). [Google translation here.] It appears that Samsung unified drivers change rights on some parts of the system: After installing the drivers, applications may launch using root rights, without asking any password. What is more, you may be able to kill your system, by deleting system components, generally modifiable only by using sudo." GerbilSoft adds: "Among the programs that it sets as setuid-root are OpenOffice, xsane, and xscanimage."
This sounds like a cheap hack. There is no need for these things to be setuid root, not on the program level. Sounds like someone is used to programming Windows drivers...
I'm tempted to infer something sinister about this, but then I remember the old adage "never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity." It keeps your blood pressure nice and low.
~Eien no Inori wo Sasagete~ Searching for my Hatsumi...
If I'm not mistaken, this is how Windows got as bad as it is.
This particular incident cannot be protested enough. If this sort of thing becomes common, End-user Linux will become as corrupted as Windows.
Pete/Petri "damn, my chainsaw is clogged with 1's and 0's again." --clyde
An app running as root can do anything it wants - and installers normally do run as root. The same problem exists on every OS: the administrator and the programs he runs can do retarded things.
The question I want to ask is why there is a driver developer working for Samsung who is able to understand the function of the setuid bit but not the security implications of using it. It seems that there is a very special type of stupidity involved here, along with some extremely thoughtless design. Samsung is taking a big risk employing morons like that.
If the guy can't understand the security implications of the setuid bit, which are well documented and not that complex, he should not be writing software.
This might have been discovered earlier, if it weren't for the closedness of the source.
/bin, /usr, etc. and notifies you immediately if permissions have changed for anything. I know such a package was available for RedHat when I was using that. That could not have detected this sooner?
Really? It could not have been detected by noticing that OpenOffice is not SetUID? I believe there is even a package for linux that monitors binaries in
Stop with your lame "thousand eyes" theory. Apparently those thousand eyes couldn't see a permissions change on their own systems.
Stop with your lame "thousand eyes" theory. Apparently those thousand eyes couldn't see a permissions change on their own systems.
But it's been seen. Is that then proof of the thousand eyes theory?
(you fucking idiot)
no user is going to be able to install such a dangerous "driver" without root access in the first place-- anyone can build a program, intentionally or accidently, that comprimises a system when ran/installed as root
Yes, but when you install a driver, you normally assume that it's not going to make your system insecure. Why should it? Only a very badly designed driver would deliberately break your system security.
Sometimes drivers do accidentally introduce security problems. The Nvidia drivers for X have done this in the past, for example. In those cases, it's not bad design, it's an oversight of some sort, like a buffer overflow.
But this is not an oversight. A deliberate design decision has been made to break the Linux security model. A very special type of stupidity is involved: one that includes an understanding of the effects of the setuid bit, but excludes an understanding of the security implications.
Samsung should investigate this fully - who knows what other retarded decisions have been made by these guys?
wrap_setuid_third_party_application xscanimage
wrap_setuid_ooo_application soffice
wrap_setuid_ooo_application swriter
wrap_setuid_ooo_application simpress
wrap_setuid_ooo_application scalc
And the content of the function for suid-making functions etc. So I have to disagree with you there.
I also agree with you though that linux distros should be automatically building in some sort of tripwire type setup to protect important system segments from scripts that are like this.
Pete/Petri "damn, my chainsaw is clogged with 1's and 0's again." --clyde
In all seriousness, I would like to know the business case for not open sourcing these drivers. It seems to me they have everything to gain and nothing to lose. I can't imagine there's any significant technological secrets contained in the drivers themselves. The value they are selling is in the physical printers, and the drivers are just there to make the printers useful.
Why not open the drivers to a free process that will almost certainly improve them, and at the same time improve the company's image in the Linux community?
That's quite the misinterpretation of the name Unix. It really was just a joke: "Unix is one of whatever Multics is many of". It doesn't have anything to do with whether the system is multi-user or not. Unix is most definitely a multi-user system. The old style permissions are definitely becoming a problem, but there are solutions such as ACLs, SELinux and beyond. They have just yet to be used in any great degree on the desktop Linuxes. Perhaps incidents like this will push Linux distributors to start using these technologies. BTW, for your little problem, just make sure you are in the disk group and everything will work. That's the whole point of why it is set that way...so that only users who are in that group can access the device (or root), and users outside of the group can't. Admittedly, it probably shouldn't be disk. That's a udev problem, but that can be fixed in a config file, which sets permissions and ownership for device nodes.
Probably, when you print using those applications, it starts a portion of the printer driver (userspace portions, maybe?) which somehow required root to run properly. Classic problem which *might* be avoided in most cases.
The proprietary driver fiasco has gone on far too long. It's time to stand up and say Enough Already!
Let's all get writing to our elected representatives and demand that hardware manufacturers be obliged, by law, to provide detailed specifications which would enable a sufficiently-competent programmer to write a driver program enabling any of the features of their product to be used on any sufficiently-capable computer.
Failure to do this places the rightful owners of hardware at a disadvantage. They can only use it in conjunction with certain Operating Systems. They are restricted to using it as the manufacturer thought fit. If a driver has a programming flaw, the user's computer can be compromised. If the Operating System is updated in such a way as the driver no longer works, the user is at the mercy of the manufacturer to release a new version of the driver -- or else the hardware is unusable (or at best, usable only through a bodge involving multi-booting: at the boot prompt, type linux to be able to use the Internet, or linuxOLD to be able to print).
It's unfortunate, but this measure really needs to be brought in through legislation, because manufacturers will not do it voluntarily. There are two reasons: (1) they are paranoid of competitors {despite the fact that their competitors are busy reverse-engineering their products in secret while they reverse-engineer the competitors' products} and (2) they habitually lie through their back teeth in their advertising literature about the capabilities of their hardware, and such lies would be exposed with disclosure (e.g. a camera with a 2 megapixel image sensor, spitting out JPEG images interpolated up to 6 megapixels).
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I deal with this kind of crap in embedded Linux installs daily. Managers and marketoids want to do all sorts of insanely stupid things under the guise of "making it easy for the customer to configure the device within a maximum of 5 minutes with no technical knowledge", etc.
In the mean time the fallout from all the insane things that "need" to be done is gaping security holes all over the place and a bunch of manager types saying 'but it doesn't matter, nobody will ever want to hack us'.
For the record I used to work for a company which built Internet-accessible security products. Whenever there was a breach it was always my fault even though I told them that enabling a particular service to the greater world was risky and would require constant attention by a qualified Linux admin and also require a regular mandatory update schedule and code reviews to continue some level of security. They never wanted to do the regular updates or code reviews because it was so costly and updates inconvenience the customer (I'm sure less than a r00ted box, but explain that to marketoids).
Suffice to say I quit that job and am starting another with a company that actually cares about security over customer friendliness (and cares about their employees at least as much as their profit margin).
I drink to make other people interesting!
Which is why most distros support POSIX ACLs...they are just not widely used. Ext2, Ext3, JFS, XFS, and ReiserFS all support ACLs (extended attributes). I believe NFS version 3 and 4 also support ACLs.
There are of course some other areas which ACL's don't address but there are pre-existing mechanisms to address those as well. Well, on most modern Unix/Linux systems anyways. The model has survived for so long for simple reasons; it's effective, simple and covers the vast majority of situations. When complex requirements come into light, more complex solutions exist. Most people just don't know about them.
This was an intentional attempt to create a backdoor.
So when this same type of thing happens in Windows it's that Windows coders are inept but when the same happens in Linux it's because of a conspiracy? Please.
The Linux community better be damn well ready for when this becomes commonplace as more people use Linux. I don't expect it as much from real vendors but it's going to happen more from the likes of amateur coders and malware producers.
Too many have fallen pray to the myth that Linux isn't going to have some of the same issues that Windows has with these areas in software. This incident alone shows that Linux will not be immune to those who don't care enough, don't know enough or are willing enough to sacrifice system security for whatever reasons.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.