CVE-2020-14386 is yet another severe vulnerability that was recently discovered in the Linux kernel. It reminds us that the fight against vulnerabilities is not over. This particular one allows a regular application to escalate its privileges and gain root access to the machine. Indeed, it sounds scary.
On September 14, CVE-2020-14386 was reported as a “high” severity threat. This CVE is a kernel security vulnerability that enables an unprivileged local process to gain root access to the system. CVE-2020-14386 is a result of a bug found in the packet socket facility in the Linux kernel. It allows a bad actor to trigger a memory corruption that can be exploited to hijack data and resources and in the most severe case, completely take over the system.
On August 15th the NSA and FBI published a joint security alert containing details about a previously undisclosed Russian malware. The agencies say that the Linux strain malware has been developed and deployed in real-world attacks by Russian military hackers.
As one of the engineers on the Gravity team here at Gravitational, I was tasked with adding SELinux support to Gravity 7.0, released back in March. The result of this work is a base Kubernetes cluster policy that confines the services (both Gravity-specific and Kubernetes) and user workloads. In this post, I will explain how I built it, which issues I ran into, and some useful tips I’d like to share. Specifically, we will look at the use of attributes for the common aspects of the policy.
A recent flaw, CVE-2019-14287, has been found in sudo. In this blogpost, we are going to show you how to use Falco or Sysdig Secure, to detect any exploit attempts against this vulnerability. sudo allows users to run commands with other user privileges. It is typically used to allow unprivileged users to execute commands as root. The issue exists in the way sudo has implemented running commands with an arbitrary user ID in versions earlier than 1.8.28.
At Sysdig we’ve recently undergone a pretty interesting shift in our core instrumentation technology, adapting our agent to take advantage of eBPF – a core part of the Linux kernel. Sysdig now supports eBPF as an alternative to our Sysdig kernel module-based architecture. Today we are excited to share more details about our integration and the inner workings of eBPF. To celebrate this exciting technology we’re publishing a series of articles entirely dedicated to eBPF.
Meltdown and Spectre are critical vulnerabilities affecting a large swathe of processors: “effectively every [Intel] processor since 1995 (except Intel Itanium and Intel Atom before 2013),” as meltdownattack.com puts it. ARM and AMD processors are susceptible to portions of Meltdown, though much less at risk than the affected Intel hardware. Exploiting Meltdown allows attackers to access data from other programs, effectively allowing them to steal whatever data they want.
