VMWare Setuid vmware-mount Unsafe popen(3)
Description
VMWare Workstation (up to and including 9.0.2 build-1031769) and Player have a setuid executable called vmware-mount that invokes lsb_release in the PATH with popen(3). Since PATH is user-controlled, and the default system shell on Debian-derived distributions does not drop privs, we can put an arbitrary payload in an executable called lsb_release and have vmware-mount happily execute it as root for us.
Author(s)
- Tavis Ormandy
- egypt <egypt@metasploit.com>
Platform
Linux
Architectures
x86
Development
Module Options
To display the available options, load the module within the Metasploit console and run the commands 'show options' or 'show advanced':
msf > use exploit/linux/local/vmware_mount
msf exploit(vmware_mount) > show targets
...targets...
msf exploit(vmware_mount) > set TARGET < target-id >
msf exploit(vmware_mount) > show options
...show and set options...
msf exploit(vmware_mount) > exploit
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