Let's state a situation:
I have the possibility to run arbitrary commands on a server as an unprivileged user, through "unconventional means".
I do not have the possibility to login using ssh to that server, either as my unprivileged user or anything else. So I do not have currently a CLI allowing me to run any commands I would like in a "normal" way.
I can ping that server and nothing prevents me to connect to arbitrary ports.
I still would like to have a command line to allow me to run arbitrary command as i wish on that server.
Theoretically nothing would prevent me to launch any program as my unprivileged user, including one that would open a port, allow some remote user to connect to it and just forward any commands to bash, returning the result. I just don't know any good program to do that.
So, does any one know? I looked at ways to launch ssh_server as an unprivileged user but some users reported that recent versions of ssh_server do not allow that anymore. Actually I don't even need ssh specifically, any way to get a working CLI would do the trick. Even a crappy node.js program launching an http server would work, as long as I have a CLI (... and it's not excessively crappy, the goal is to have a clean CLI, not something that bugs every two characters).
In case you would ask why I would like to do that, it's not related to anything illegal ^^. I just have to work with a very crappy Jenkins server for which I'm not allowed to have direct access to its agents. Whoever is responsible for that server doesn't give a sh** about its users' needs so we have to use hacky solutions just to have some diagnostic data about that server (like ram, cpu and disk usage, installed programs, etc...). Having a CLI that I can launch some time instead of altering a build configuration and waiting 20 minutes to have an answer about what's going on would really help.
Thanks in advance for any answer.
So do you have shell access to the server at least once? E.g., during the single day of the month when you are physically present at the site of your client or the outsourcing contractor?
And if you have shell access then, can you or your sysmin install Cockpit?
It listens on port 9090.
You can then use the credentials of your local user and open a terminal window in your browser. See sidebar item "Terminal" on the screenshots of the cockpit homepage.
According to the documentation
Cockpit has no special privileges and doesn’t run as root. It creates a session as the logged in user and has the same permissions as that user.
Related
Use case:
I would like to host a console application I built on an EC2 instance on AWS and give very strict limited access to the people who will connect to it:
They must not be able to access the shell or execute any command on the machine
They must not be able to use port forwarding
They must not be able to copy or read anything from that machine, especially not environment variables
They are only allowed to use that console application
My solution:
Create a user:
I replace its shell by the console application so the user can only access to that and nothing else
Disable port forwarding
I'm not sure if that would be enough to secure the machine. That's why I'm asking here some advice or confirmation that this will work and will be 100% secure.
As we discussed on the comment section of your question:
If you manage to replace the shell of the user for your application console and guarantee that it's not possible to run bash commands, terminal built-in functions (like export, enable, disable), and make sure that your application console have the right permissions (rwx) to interact with only the files and paths that your application needs to interact, then, you should be fine.
I want to automate testing of my users' source code files by letting them upload c++,python, lisp, scala, etc. files to my linux machine where a service will find them in a folder and then compile/run them to verify that they are correct. This server contains no important information about any of my users, so there's no database or anything for someone to hack. But I'm no security expert so I'm still worried about a user somehow finding a way to run arbitrary commands with root privileges (basically I don't have any idea what sorts of things can go wrong). Is there a safe way to do this?
They will. If you give someone the power to compile, it is very hard not to escalate to root. You say that server is not important to you, but what if someone sends you an email from that server, or alters some script, to obtain some info on your home machine or another server you use?
At least you need to strongly separate you from them. I would suggest linux containers, https://linuxcontainers.org/ they are trendy these days. But be careful, this is the kind of service that is always dangerous, no matter how much you protect yourself.
Read more about chroot command in Linux.
This way you can provide every running user program with separate isolated container.
You should under no circumstances allow a user to run code on your server with root privileges. A user could then just run rm –rf / and it would delete everything on your server.
I suggest you make a new local user / group that has very limited permissions, e.g. can only access one folder. So when you run the code on your server, you run it in that folder, and the user can not access anything else. After the code has finished you delete the content of the folder. You should also test this vigorously to check that they really cant destroy / manipulate anything.
If you're running on FreeBSD you could also look at Jails, which is sort-of a way of virtualization and limiting a user / program to that sandbox.
I usually use PuTTY to execute commands on a Linux machine. But I wish to make a webpage from where I can execute specific commands on a Linux machine by simple button clicks.
What are the various options available and what is the one that is easy to implement?
This depends on the kind of server you are running. But almost all servers have some kind of CGI support or an equivalent. Keep in mind that this can often cause a security issue.
I don't think you can and should try to embed script code in your page.
The best suggestion may be to hyperlink a script file and let the user get it from your server.
Just put that file on the server and then hyperlink it.
securewebcmd can do this for you
can use http or https
password protected
password not transmitted in clear, even using http (hashes the commandline with the password, and server does the same thing, using its copy of the password, and only runs the command, if the hashes match)
can queue commands, which run sequentially
can view results of any of the commands you've run earlier, even if you restart the server
uses nodejs: no dependency on any heavyweight server, ie no need for apache, jboss etc ...
I want to build a web based admin tools that allow the system admin to run pre-configured commands and scripts through a web page (simple and limited webmin), what is the best approach?
I already started with Ubuntu installing LAMP and give the user www-data root's privileges !!!
as I learned (please check the link) this is a really bad move !!!, so how to build such web-based system without the security risk?
cheers
I did something like this a couple of years ago. It was (I like think) fairly secure and only accessible to a limited number of pre-vetted, authenticated users, but it still left me with an uneasy feeling! If you can avoid doing it, I'd recommend you do :)
I had a database sitting between the frontend web-tier and the script which was actually executing actions. The relevant table contained a symbolic command name and an optional numeric argument, which was sufficient for my needs. This allows you to audit what's been executed, provides a quick and dirty way to have a non-www user do things, and means if the website is compromised they're constrained by the DB structure (somewhat) and the script which pulls data from it.
The data from the DB can be read by a daemon running in a separate, unprivileged account. The daemon pulls and sanitises data from the DB and maps the 'command' to an actual executable (with a hard-coded map, so commandA executes A, commandB executes foo, and anything else would get flagged as an error). The account can be locked down using AppArmor (or SELinux, I imagine) to prevent it from executing, reading or writing anything you don't expect it to. Have a system in place to alert you of any errors from either the daemon or AppArmor/SELinux.
The executables which the daemon runs can be setuid'd if appropriate, or you can use the sudoers mechanism to allow the unprivileged account to execute them without a password.
I already started with Ubuntu installing LAMP and give the user www-data root's privileges
Don't do this.
If you really want to execute some very specific scripts under root privileged. Create such predefined very limited scripts, allow their password-less execution with sudo for specific user and then run them via script and don't forget authentication.
Generally this is bad idea.
SSH is your best friend.
I have a UI app (uses GTK) for Linux that requires to be run as root (it reads and writes /dev/sd*).
Instead of requiring the user to open a root shell or use "sudo" manually every time when he launches my app, I wonder if the app can use some OS-provided API to get root permissions. (Note: gtk app's can't use "setuid" mode, so that's not an option here.)
The advantage here would be an easier workflow: The user could, from his default user account, double click my app from the desktop instead of having to open a root terminal and launch it from there.
I ask this because OS X offers exactly this: An app can ask the OS to launch an executable with root permissions - the OS (and not the app) then asks the user to input his credentials, verifies them and then launches the target as desired.
I wonder if there's something similar for Linux (Ubuntu, e.g.)
Clarification:
So, after the hint at PolicyKit I wonder if I can use that to get r/w access to the "/dev/sd..." block devices. I find the documention quite hard to understand, so I thought I'd first ask whether this is possible at all before I spend hours on trying to understand it in vain.
Update:
The app is a remote operated disk repair tool for the unsavvy Linux user, and those Linux noobs won't have much understanding of using sudo or even changing their user's group memberships, especially if their disk just started acting up and they're freaking out. That's why I seek a solution that avoids technicalities like this.
The old way, simple but now being phased out, is GKSu. Here is the discussion on GKSu's future.
The new way is to use PolicyKit. I'm not quite sure how this works but I think you need to launch your app using the pkexec command.
UPDATE:
Looking at the example code on http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/polkit/polkit-apps.html, it seems that you can use PolicyKit to obtain authorization for certain actions which are described by .policy files in /usr/share/polkit-1/actions. The action for executing a program as another user is org.freedesktop.policykit.exec. I can't seem to find an action for directly accessing block devices, but I have to admit, the PolicyKit documentation breaks my brain too.
So, perhaps the simplest course of action for you is to separate your disk-mangling code that requires privileges into a command-line utility, and run that from your GUI application using g_spawn_[a]sync() with pkexec. That way you wouldn't have to bother with requesting actions and that sort of thing. It's probably bad practice anyway to run your whole GUI application as root.
Another suggestion is to ask the author of PolicyKit (David Zeuthen) directly. Or try posting your question to the gtk-app-devel list.