Linux Capabilities

Capabilities

Normally the root user (or any ID with UID of 0) gets a special treatment when running processes. The kernel and applications are usually programmed to skip the restriction of some activities when seeing this user ID. In other words, this user is allowed to do (almost) anything.

Linux capabilities provide a subset of the available root privileges to a process. This effectively breaks up root privileges into smaller and distinctive units. Each of these units can then be independently be granted to processes. This way the full set of privileges is reduced and decreasing the risks of exploitation.

Why capabilities?

To better understand how Linux capabilities work, let’s have a look first at the problem it tries to solve.

Let’s assume we are running a process as a normal user. This means we are non-privileged. We can only access data that owned by us, our group, or which is marked for access by all users. At some point in time, our process needs a little bit more permissions to fulfill its duties, like opening a network socket. The problem is that normal users can not open a socket, as this requires root permissions.

List Capabilities

#You list all the capabilities with
capsh --print

Here you can find some capabilities with short descriptions

Capabilities name	Description
CAP_AUDIT_CONTROL	Allow to enable/disable kernel auditing
CAP_AUDIT_WRITE	Helps to write records to kernel auditing log
CAP_BLOCK_SUSPEND	This feature can block system suspends
CAP_CHOWN	Allow user to make arbitrary change to files UIDs and GIDs (full filesystem access)
CAP_DAC_OVERRIDE	This helps to bypass file read, write and execute permission checks (full filesystem access)
CAP_DAC_READ_SEARCH	This only bypass file and directory read/execute permission checks
CAP_FOWNER	This enables to bypass permission checks on operations that normally require the filesystem UID of the process to match the UID of the file
CAP_KILL	Allow the sending of signals to processes belonging to others
CAP_SETGID	Allow changing of the GID
CAP_SETUID	Allow changing of the UID (set UID of root in you process)
CAP_SETPCAP	Helps to transferring and removal of current set to any PID
CAP_IPC_LOCK	This helps to lock memory
CAP_MAC_ADMIN	Allow MAC configuration or state changes
CAP_NET_RAW	Use RAW and PACKET sockets
CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE	SERVICE Bind a socket to internet domain privileged ports
CAP_SYS_CHROOT	Ability to call chroot()

Capabilities Sets

Inherited capabilities

CapEff: The effective capability set represents all capabilities the process is using at the moment (this is the actual set of capabilities that the kernel uses for permission checks). For file capabilities the effective set is in fact a single bit indicating whether the capabilities of the permitted set will be moved to the effective set upon running a binary. This makes it possible for binaries that are not capability-aware to make use of file capabilities without issuing special system calls.

CapPrm: (Permitted) This is a superset of capabilities that the thread may add to either the thread permitted or thread inheritable sets. The thread can use the capset() system call to manage capabilities: It may drop any capability from any set, but only add capabilities to its thread effective and inherited sets that are in its thread permitted set. Consequently it cannot add any capability to its thread permitted set, unless it has the cap_setpcap capability in its thread effective set.

CapInh: Using the inherited set all capabilities that are allowed to be inherited from a parent process can be specified. This prevents a process from receiving any capabilities it does not need. This set is preserved across an execve and is usually set by a process receiving capabilities rather than by a process that’s handing out capabilities to its children.

CapBnd: With the bounding set it’s possible to restrict the capabilities a process may ever receive. Only capabilities that are present in the bounding set will be allowed in the inheritable and permitted sets.

CapAmb: The ambient capability set applies to all non-SUID binaries without file capabilities. It preserves capabilities when calling execve. However, not all capabilities in the ambient set may be preserved because they are being dropped in case they are not present in either the inheritable or permitted capability set. This set is preserved across execve calls.

For a detailed explanation of the difference between capabilities in threads and files and how are the capabilities passed to threads read the following pages:

• https://blog.container-solutions.com/linux-capabilities-why-they-exist-and-how-they-work

• https://blog.ploetzli.ch/2014/understanding-linux-capabilities/

Processes Capabilities

To see the capabilities for a particular process, use the status file in the /proc directory. As it provides more details, let’s limit it only to the information related to Linux capabilities. Note that for all running processes capability information is maintained per thread, for binaries in the file system it’s stored in extended attributes.

cat /proc/1234/status | grep Cap
cat /proc/$$/status | grep Cap #This will print the capabilities of the current process

This command should return 5 lines on most systems.

• CapInh = Inherited capabilities

• CapPrm = Permitted capabilities

• CapEff = Effective capabilities

• CapBnd = Bounding set

• CapAmb = Ambient capabilities set

#These are the typical capabilities of a root owned process (all)
CapInh: 0000000000000000
CapPrm: 0000003fffffffff
CapEff: 0000003fffffffff
CapBnd: 0000003fffffffff
CapAmb: 0000000000000000

These hexadecimal numbers don’t make sense. Using the capsh utility we can decode them into the capabilities name.

capsh --decode=0000003fffffffff
0x0000003fffffffff=cap_chown,cap_dac_override,cap_dac_read_search,cap_fowner,cap_fsetid,cap_kill,cap_setgid,cap_setuid,cap_setpcap,cap_linux_immutable,cap_net_bind_service,cap_net_broadcast,cap_net_admin,cap_net_raw,cap_ipc_lock,cap_ipc_owner,cap_sys_module,cap_sys_rawio,cap_sys_chroot,cap_sys_ptrace,cap_sys_pacct,cap_sys_admin,cap_sys_boot,cap_sys_nice,cap_sys_resource,cap_sys_time,cap_sys_tty_config,cap_mknod,cap_lease,cap_audit_write,cap_audit_control,cap_setfcap,cap_mac_override,cap_mac_admin,cap_syslog,cap_wake_alarm,cap_block_suspend,37

Lets check now the capabilities used by ping:

cat /proc/9491/status | grep Cap
CapInh:    0000000000000000
CapPrm:    0000000000003000
CapEff:    0000000000000000
CapBnd:    0000003fffffffff
CapAmb:    0000000000000000

capsh --decode=0000000000003000
0x0000000000003000=cap_net_admin,cap_net_raw

Although that works, there is another and easier way. To see the capabilities of a running process, simply use the getpcaps tool followed by its process ID (PID). You can also provide a list of process IDs.

getpcaps 1234

Lets check here the capabilities of tcpdump after having giving the binary enough capabilities (cap_net_admin and cap_net_raw) to sniff the network (tcpdump is running in process 9562):

#The following command give tcpdump the needed capabilities to sniff traffic
$ setcap cap_net_raw,cap_net_admin=eip /usr/sbin/tcpdump

$ getpcaps 9562
Capabilities for `9562': = cap_net_admin,cap_net_raw+ep

$ cat /proc/9562/status | grep Cap
CapInh:    0000000000000000
CapPrm:    0000000000003000
CapEff:    0000000000003000
CapBnd:    0000003fffffffff
CapAmb:    0000000000000000

$ capsh --decode=0000000000003000
0x0000000000003000=cap_net_admin,cap_net_raw

As you can see the given capabilities corresponds with the results of the 2 ways of getting the capabilities of a binary. The getpcaps tool uses the capget() system call to query the available capabilities for a particular thread. This system call only needs to provide the PID to obtain more information.

Dropping capabilities with capsh

If we drop the CAP_NET_RAW capabilities for ping, then the ping utility should no longer work.

capsh --drop=cap_net_raw --print -- -c "tcpdump"

Besides the output of capsh itself, the tcpdump command itself should also raise an error.

/bin/bash: /usr/sbin/tcpdump: Operation not permitted

The error clearly shows that the ping command is not allowed to open an ICMP socket. Now we know for sure that this works as expected.

Remove Capabilities

You can remove capabilities of a binary with

setcap -r </path/to/binary>

User Capabilities

Apparently it's possible to assign capabilities also to users. This probably means that every process executed by the user will be able to use the users capabilities. Base on on this, this and this a few files new to be configured to give a user certain capabilities but the one assigning the capabilities to each user will be /etc/security/capability.conf. File example:

# Simple
cap_sys_ptrace               developer
cap_net_raw                  user1

# Multiple capablities
cap_net_admin,cap_net_raw    jrnetadmin
# Identical, but with numeric values
12,13                        jrnetadmin

# Combining names and numerics
cap_sys_admin,22,25          jrsysadmin

Malicious Use

Capabilities are useful when you want to restrict your own processes after performing privileged operations (e.g. after setting up chroot and binding to a socket). However, they can be exploited by passing them malicious commands or arguments which are then run as root.

You can force capabilities upon programs using setcap, and query these using getcap:

#Set Capability
setcap cap_net_raw+ep /sbin/ping

#Get Capability
getcap /sbin/ping
/sbin/ping = cap_net_raw+ep

The +ep means you’re adding the capability (“-” would remove it) as Effective and Permitted.

To identify programs in a system or folder with capabilities:

getcap -r / 2>/dev/null

Exploitation example

In the following example the binary /usr/bin/python2.6 is found vulnerable to privesc:

setcap cap_setuid+ep /usr/bin/python2.7
/usr/bin/python2.7 = cap_setuid+ep

#Exploit
/usr/bin/python2.7 -c 'import os; os.setuid(0); os.system("/bin/bash");'

Capabilities needed by tcpdump to allow any user to sniff packets:

setcap cap_net_raw,cap_net_admin=eip /usr/sbin/tcpdump
getcap /usr/sbin/tcpdump
/usr/sbin/tcpdump = cap_net_admin,cap_net_raw+eip

The special case of "empty" capabilities

Note that one can assign empty capability sets to a program file, and thus it is possible to create a set-user-ID-root program that changes the effective and saved set-user-ID of the process that executes the program to 0, but confers no capabilities to that process. Or, simply put, if you have a binary that:

1. is not owned by root

2. has no SUID/SGID bits set

3. has empty capabilities set (e.g.: getcap myelf returns myelf =ep)

then that binary will run as root.

References

• https://vulp3cula.gitbook.io/hackers-grimoire/post-exploitation/privesc-linux

• https://www.schutzwerk.com/en/43/posts/linux_container_capabilities/#:~:text=Inherited%20capabilities%3A%20A%20process%20can,a%20binary%2C%20e.g.%20using%20setcap%20.

• https://linux-audit.com/linux-capabilities-101/

• https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5737