Linux

The disk group seems innocent enough - it’s meant for disk management utilities. But give someone disk group access and you’ve essentially handed them root. Here’s how to exploit raw block device access to bypass all file permissions and escalate privileges. While the XKCD comic above is tongue-in-cheek, using dd for filesystem manipulation is genuinely powerful and dangerous. The Linux disk group allows raw access to disks on the system. It’s meant to allow members to use tools to manage disk partitions and format disks at the block level. However, it can also be used to get arbitrary file read/write by directly editing the disk contents even if file system permissions forbid it. For this reason it is a very privileged group and should be considered equivalent to root access. ...

When creating a socket unless manually specified, the OS will automatically determine the source address to use. However, the OS’s default choice may not always be desired. Source Address Selection allows for influencing the sources address chosen by the OS. What is Source Address Selection? When a host with multiple routable IP addresses sends a packet to another host, it needs to determine which of its local addresses to use as the source “from” address. ...

Recent versions of Ubuntu are shipping with Snapcraft by default, and some of the default applications run inside a snap as well. Snaps are application containers, similar to Docker, but designed for desktop applications. Unfortunately Canonical seems to be pushing Snaps hard, and they are not always wanted. This is made worse by not providing an easy way to remove the snap functionality for Ubuntu. The commands bellow will entirely remove snap from an Ubuntu installation. ...

For those of you not in the know, ambergris is defined as: a wax-like substance that originates as a secretion in the intestines of the sperm whale, found floating in tropical seas and used in perfume manufacture. However, that will not be what this post is about (sorry to disappoint). Instead, I’ll present what happens when building an image on Docker that contains a reverse shell in the Dockerfile. ...

A while ago I was working on building a custom kernel for my Android phone. Once you get the source the compilation process is not as straightforward as I hoped. Here are the steps required to get from the kernel source to a flashable image for your phone. Get a copy of the build toolchain and Linux kernel for your device First download a copy of the pre-build toolchain from git. ...

By default CrunchBang Linux does not have hibernation support enabled in the shutdown menu. The reason for being excluded is likely because not all computers support hibernation. However most modern computers will support it. To add a hibernation option just download this file and place it in the bin directory of your home folder: “~/bin/” and make it executable with: chmod +x cb-exit cb-exit Gist If you want to test your system to see if it can handle hibernation run the following command. If your system supports it you should be able to successfully enter and exit hibernation: ...

This is about a piece of software I wrote over a year ago to fit a need I had at the time. It probably will not receive any updates but I have released the source to anyone is free to do as they please with it. Background PHPRepo is a PHP CMS for managing Debian package repositories. A while ago I wanted to start my own repository for some of my own packages, so I looked for an easy way to do this. I found none. At the time the only way to run and manage a Debian package repository was through apt at the command line, and since at the time I was learning PHP I decided to write my own software to fill this void. Thus I created PHPRepo. PHPRepo has very minimal requirements and can work alongside an existing repository that is managed with apt. ...

This is a minimalistic how-to to get a Debian environment running on almost any (rooted) android phone. I adopted the method here: http://www.saurik.com/id/10 to be more universal and added some new features. Preparing the Debian Image You will need access to a computer running a Debian based distribution to create the image for you phone. I used Ubuntu 10.04. To create the image you need to install a program called debootstrap. debootstrap will allow you to create a mini Debian install in your image. ...

This is a simple how-to on using Microsoft’s Active Directory for user authentication on Linux systems. The method described in this guide should work for Cent OS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and Fedora. Debian based distributions do not have the tools used in this method and require a different setup. This guide used Cent OS 5.5 with a minimal text only install, however it should apply the same to other compatible versions of Linux. ...

PXE is a method for booting an operating system over a network, it stands for Pre-Executable environment. Here I will show you how to build a PXE server to boot and or install operating systems over your network. Installing the server OS I made this server inside VMWare, however the steps are the same if you are using a different virtual machine server or a physical machine. I used Debian 5.0 and used the net-install iso. Since we will only be needing a bare Debian install and just a few extra packages there is no need to download/install the entire OS. ...