ABRT raceabrt Privilege Escalation
Posted on 16 February 2018
This Metasploit module attempts to gain root privileges on Fedora systems with a vulnerable version of Automatic Bug Reporting Tool (ABRT) configured as the crash handler. A race condition allows local users to change ownership of arbitrary files (CVE-2015-3315). This Metasploit module uses a symlink attack on '/var/tmp/abrt/*/maps' to change the ownership of /etc/passwd, then adds a new user with UID=0 GID=0 to gain root privileges. Winning the race could take a few minutes. This Metasploit module has been tested successfully on ABRT packaged version 2.1.5-1.fc19 on Fedora Desktop 19 x86_64, 2.2.1-1.fc19 on Fedora Desktop 19 x86_64 and 2.2.2-2.fc20 on Fedora Desktop 20 x86_64. Fedora 21 and Red Hat 7 systems are reportedly affected, but untested.