Exploit: HP-UX 10.20 One night I had nothing better to do, so I logged on to my college to play with the computers... I was surprised to see in MOTD that we are upgraded to Hp-UX 10.20.. So I decided to check for suid binaries... Sure enough I found a ton of them (more than 50 I belive) One of the programs that attracted my attention was cue (Hewlett Packard Character-based User Environment) As it was possible to make it a login program, I decided to investigate further. $ export LOGNAME=root $ cue Welcome root That was encouraging, of course it gave up the suid priviledges when I got the shell, but a different problem exists.. Since it was mislead by $LOGNAME (big oops in login programs :), it detected that I am in fact not root... BUT When I did ls -la, I found this: -rw------- root mygroup 0 IOERROR.mytty So, it also follows my umask... $ umask 000 $ cue -rw-rw-rw- root mygroup 0 IOERROR.mytty I decided to check whether or not it will follow symlinks, so I created a symlink to /lost+found/test (unwriteable by anyone) $ cue $ ls -la /lost+found -rw-rw-rw- root mygroup 0 test So, it also follows symlinks... However, it wipes out the target file. A symlink to /etc/passwd comes to mind. But, since it follows the umask, it might be possible to replace binaries executed by system... In any event, a very dangerous condition... I do not have the access to source code, so I can't think of a patch. Probably replace getenv with getuid or something like that. So the recommendation would be to remove the program's suid bit, as usual.