Sloppy File Permissions Make Red Star OS Vulnerable

An anonymous reader writes: Red Star OS Desktop 3.0, the official Linux distro of North Korea, which recently found its way onto torrents and various download sites in form of an ISO image, is interesting for a number of reasons, including its attempt to look like commercial operating systems (currently OS X, earlier versions mimicked the Windows GUI). Hackers are also poking Red Star for security vulnerabilities. An pseudonymous researcher noted in a post to the Open Source Software Security (oss-sec) mailing list, that the OS has one significant security hole: Red Star 3.0 ships with a world-writeable udev rule file /etc/udev/rules.d/85-hplj10xx.rules (originally designed for HP LaserJet 1000 series printers) which can be modified to include RUN+= arguments executing arbitrary commands as root by Udev. In the post he also mentions how the older Red Star 2.0 shipped with another schoolboy mistake: /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit was world-writeable.

Comments

Master plan

[lucm]

Awesome! At last a way to hack North Korea and steal all their... valuable things?

Re: Master plan

[jrumney]

Too late, Kim Jong Un ordered the general who bought the HP printer to be executed already, and ordered his brother to buy a Canon inkjet to replace it. The brother was also executed for bring imperialist Japanese goods into Korea, but at least they have a new national printer now. Both the PCs are now being studied by North Koreas elite hacking squad to see if the files can be removed without recompiling the whole system from scratch, but the results are not promising so we may see more outage on the North Korean netblock again this week.

Re:...for a number of reasons

[SeaFox]

I hear a CD-R and a balloon were used.