Re: [dev] Privilege escalation on remote hosts. MANY remote hosts.

From: Antenore <antenore_AT_simbiosi.org>
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2017 18:38:42 +0000

Sorry I'm on my mobile.

What about using custom public SSH keys that force the execution of a specific command/script instead of the default login shell?

If you're interested I can give you more details later.

I've a suid script that is used instead of the login shell and it parses the parameters I send through SSH. If the parameters are valid, it execute other commands and scripts with that parameters.

On 21 September 2017 15:52:25 CEST, harry666t_AT_gmail.com wrote:
>Hi list,
>
>TL;DR: passwordless sudo is same as making $USER equal to root at all
>times. Requiring a password is a royal PITA when trying to run one
>command on many many hosts. Scripting interactive password input sucks.
>Other methods are non-portable. Practical ideas?
>
>Long version:
>
>I've been working on Judo[1], a less-sucky alternative to Ansible[2].
>The exact problem it solves is basically that of "for host in ...; do
>scp script ${host}: && ssh ${host} ./script; done", except with some
>seatbelts and goodies (like parallel execution, logging, host
>inventory,
>cleanup, master connection for speed, etc).
>
>[1]: https://github.com/rollcat/judo
>[2]: https://www.ansible.com/
>
>I have a working PoC, written in Go, which I've been using to manage my
>personal machines, and occasionally even for stuff I was actually paid
>to do. So, Judo is already proving productive. But before I can
>finalize
>the design and set some things in stone, I feel that I need to solve
>one
>last outstanding design problem: privilege escalation at scale. I want
>managing 5 hosts to be as simple and practical as managing a fleet of
>5000, while not compromising too much in other areas.
>
>Currently, Judo assumes absolutely no interaction from its scripts on
>any hosts. On the remote side, stdin is closed as soon as possible, no
>PTY is allocated, etc. This is on purpose, by design, and won't change:
>this is one of the more frustrating things about Ansible, and there's
>no
>sane way to do it when interacting with N hosts, in parallel.
>
>This doesn't mesh well with interactive sudo (or doas, or su, or
>whatever other interactive privilege escalation tool you'd use). The
>"get things done" solution is to use the 0-factor authentication
>variant
>with NOPASSWD, which IMHO is just a more complex and elaborate way of
>aliasing $USER to UID 0 in /etc/passwd, and will leave many sysops
>unhappy.
>
>The way Ansible solves this, is there's a script to interact with sudo,
>su, doas, etc - this means the core product has specific kludge in
>place
>to interact with every possible PrivEsc method, and every new tool to
>support needs another piece of kludge. (Probably why it's at 600k SLOC
>vs Judo's 1k.) On the other hand, Judo is not even aware of sudo / doas
>/ sup / su / etc, as privilege escalation is simply not considered in
>scope at this time - the problem is currently delegated to the script
>running on the target machine. Most of my scripts have this preamble:
>'if [ "$(id -u)" != 0 ]; then exec sudo -n -- $0 "$_AT_"; fi'.
>
>If we wanted to require some other authentication factor, say via PAM,
>that'd make matters even worse. Judo currently seems to work fine with
>whatever you throw at it, I've tested it with Debian, CentOS, OpenBSD,
>FreeBSD, RouterOS, on amd64, i386, arm... And it just works, because
>the
>core assumes very very little about the remote machine. PAM sucks and
>doesn't even exist on OpenBSD, Slackware, many embedded systems, etc.
>
>I was thinking about writing a tiny helper tool to run on the remote
>end, that would: 1. read a one-time token from a file/fd, 2. delete
>that
>file, and 3. if ok, execute the given script with escalated privileges;
>then integrate this with Judo, so that the controlling host would
>generate these one-time tokens and send them off to remote hosts. But
>the tool would have to be a statically-linked executable, one for each
>OS+release+arch combo. Sounds like another PITA to manage; especially
>since Judo assumes almost nothing about the target host (and again, I'd
>like to keep it that way).
>
>Until a while ago, I've been telling myself this is not a real problem,
>and password-less sudo is fine, because if someone can put something
>like 'sudo() { ... }' in my ~/.profile, I'm toast anyway. Somehow I
>don't feel easy about this, there must be a way to add an
>authentication
>factor to privilege escalation that doesn't suck.
>
>And lastly, I don't want to assume that everyone's remote hosts will
>always allow unauthenticated sudo, because that's a silly assumption. I
>also don't want anyone to have to put an 'if not root then sudo myself'
>preamble in every script - boilerplate is evil.
>
>Looks like whichever way to go, there's always a compromise to make:
>adding complexity, dropping authentication, sacrificing portability,
>hardcoding assumptions, proliferating boilerplate...
>I'd love to hear ideas & opinions.
>
><3,K.
Received on Thu Sep 21 2017 - 20:38:42 CEST

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