SystemTap 1.3 MODPROBE_OPTIONS Privilege Escalation
Posted on 19 April 2019
This Metasploit module attempts to gain root privileges by exploiting a vulnerability in the staprun executable included with SystemTap version 1.3. The staprun executable does not clear environment variables prior to executing modprobe, allowing an arbitrary configuration file to be specified in the MODPROBE_OPTIONS environment variable, resulting in arbitrary command execution with root privileges. This module has been tested successfully on: systemtap 1.2-1.fc13-i686 on Fedora 13 (i686); and systemtap 1.1-3.el5 on RHEL 5.5 (x64).
