Redhat 4.2 X11 /tmp/.X11-unix permissions problem

Date: Fri, 14 Nov 1997 02:13:22 +0100
From: Carlo Wood <carlo@RUNAWAY.XS4ALL.NL>
To: BUGTRAQ@NETSPACE.ORG
Subject: X Security problem (?)

Hi,

        this isn't an exploit - I let others write that ;) (don't
have time for that).

But five minutes ago I found something that might be abused:

On my (RedHat4.2) linux box, I find:

/tmp/.X11-unix/X0=

A UNIX domain socket of the X server I assume.

The permissions are:

drwxrwxrwt   3 root     root         1024 Nov 14 01:38 /tmp/
drwxrwxrwx   2 root     users        1024 Nov 14 01:56 /tmp/.X11-unix/
srwxrwxrwx   1 root     users           0 Nov 13 23:09 X0

So, as any user (I did it as 'nobody'), I can do:

rm /tmp/.X11-unix/X0

After which X doesn't work anymore (can't open a new terminal).

I can also do:

cd /tmp/.X11-unix
mv X0 Y0

(can't open an xterm)

mv Y0 X0

(everything works again).

Now I didn't test the following, but doesn't this mean that I can
- as nobody - mv X0 Y0; open a new X0 socket and start to accept
connections, piping everything to Y0, reading everything people
type, like passwords when they use 'su' ? ...

Carlo Wood

PS This is my first post, so I expect to make a terrible error
   here somehow ;).  If so, I hope the moderator will simply
   refuse the post.

--
 carlo@runaway.xs4all.nl, Run @ IRC.

 ircd development:  http://www.xs4all.nl/~carlo17/ircd-dev