Buffer overflow attack, possible to regenerate a random canary? - random

I'm working on a system security project with the topic: buffe roverflow attack.
I do have a program and the sourcecode I should gain root permissions with.
The problem I have is caused by a random canary, at the beginning ot the program the random number generator is initialized:
srand(time(NULL) ^ (getpid() << 16));
later on the canary gets set by
canary = rand();
My question: Is it possible to regenerate the canary? I would like to regenerate the salt (time(NULL) returns the time since 1970 in seconds and pid is constant as the program starts) and then get the canary by calling rand().
I'm not familiar with any script language and do not have a lot linux experience, so I hope not to waste time with a solution that would never work.
Thank you in advance! :)

Yes, it's possible. All you need to know is the program's start time and process ID. You can get this information from the command line by entering ps -eo pid,cmd,lstart | grep «program-name». For example, suppose the program you're interested in is called test:
$ ps -eo pid,cmd,lstart | grep test
26798 ./test Thu Oct 26 22:03:52 2017
The number at the start of the output line is the process ID, and the time at which this process started is at the end of the line. You can easily convert this to a Unix timestamp:
$ date --date='Thu Oct 26 22:03:52 2017' '+%s'
1509055432
Last time I checked, PHP was still using the same random number generator. So you can use PHP to calculate the canary:
$ php -r 'srand(1509055432 ^ (26798 << 16)); echo rand()."\n";'
1670313680
(If you don't have PHP, you could easily roll your own C application to do this calculation for you.)
It should be quite obvious that srand(time(NULL)) is of no use whatsoever if you want to generate values that are hard to guess. A better approach would be to fetch bytes from \dev\urandom instead.

Related

FreeBSD script to show active connections and append number remote file

I am using NetScaler FreeBSD, which recognizes many of the UNIX like commands, grep, awk, crontab… etc.
I run the following command to get the number of connected users that we have on the system
#> nsconmsg -g aaa_cur_ica_conn -d stats
OUTPUT (numbered lines):
Line1: Displaying current counter value information
Line2: NetScaler V20 Performance Data
Line3: NetScaler NS11.1: Build 63.9.nc, Date: Oct 11 2019, 06:17:35
Line4:
Line5: reltime:mili second between two records Sun Jun 28 23:12:15 2020
Line6: Index reltime counter-value symbol-name&device-no
Line7: 1 2675410 605 aaa_cur_ica_conn
…
…
From above output - I only need the number of connected users (represented in Line 7, 3rd column (605 to be precise), along with the Hostname and Time (of the running script)
Now, to extract this important 3rd column number i.e. 605, along with the hostname, and time of data collected - I wrote the following script:
printf '%s - %s - %s\n' "$(hostname)" "$(date '+%H:%M')" "$(nsconmsg -g aaa_cur_ica_conn -d stats | grep aaa_cur_ica_conn | awk '{print $3}')"
The result is perfect, showing hostname, time, and the number of connected users as follows:
Hostname - 09:00 – 605
Now can anyone please shed light on how I can:
Run this script every day - 5am to 5pm (12hours)?
Each time scripts runs - append a file on a remote Unix share with the output?
I appreciate this might be a bit if a challenge... however would be grateful for any bash scripts wizards out there that can create magic!
Thanks in advance!
I would suggest a quick look into the FreeBSD Handbook or For People New to Both FreeBSD and UNIX® so that you could get familiar with the operating system and tools that could help you achieve better what you want.
For example, there is a utility/command named cron
The software utility cron is a time-based job scheduler in Unix-like computer operating systems.
For example, to run something all days between 5am to 5pm every minute, you could use something like:
* 05-17 * * * command
Try more options here: https://crontab.guru/#*_05-17_*_*_*.
There are more tools for scheduling commands, for example at (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_(command)) but this something you need to evaluate and read more about it.
Now regarding the command, you are using to get the "number of connected users", you could avoid the grep and just used awk for example:
awk '/aaa_cur_ica_conn/ {print $3}'
This will print only column 3 if line contains aaa_cur_ica_conn, but as before I invite you to read more about the topic so that you could bet a better overview and better understand the commands.
Last but not least, check this link How do I ask a good question? the better you could format, and elaborate your question the easy for others to give an answer.

How to resume reading a file?

I'm trying to find the best and most efficient way to resume reading a file from a given point.
The given file is being written frequently (this is a log file).
This file is rotated on a daily basis.
In the log file I'm looking for a pattern 'slow transaction'. End of such lines have a number into parentheses. I want to have the sum of the numbers.
Example of log line:
Jun 24 2015 10:00:00 slow transaction (5)
Jun 24 2015 10:00:06 slow transaction (1)
This is easy part that I could do with awk command to get total of 6 with above example.
Now my challenge is that I want to get the values from this file on a regular basis. I've an external system that polls a custom OID using SNMP. When hitting this OID the Linux host runs a couple of basic commands.
I want this SNMP polling event to get the number of events since the last polling only. I don't want to have the total every time, just the total of the newly added lines.
Just to mention that only bash can be used, or basic commands such as awk sed tail etc. No perl or advanced programming language.
I hope my description will be clear enough. Apologizes if this is duplicate. I did some researches before posting but did not find something that precisely correspond to my need.
Thank you for any assistance
In addition to the methods in the comment link, you can also simply use dd and stat to read the logfile size, save it and sleep 300 then check the logfile size again. If the filesize has changed, then skip over the old information with dd and read the new information only.
Note: you can add a test to handle the case where the logfile is deleted and then restarted with 0 size (e.g. if $((newsize < size)) then read all.
Here is a short example with 5 minute intervals:
#!/bin/bash
lfn=${1:-/path/to/logfile}
size=$(stat -c "%s" "$lfn") ## save original log size
while :; do
newsize=$(stat -c "%s" "$lfn") ## get new log size
if ((size != newsize)); then ## if change, use new info
## use dd to skip over existing text to new text
newtext=$(dd if="$lfn" bs="$size" skip=1 2>/dev/null)
## process newtext however you need
printf "\nnewtext:\n\n%s\n" "$newtext"
size=$((newsize)); ## update size to newsize
fi
sleep 300
done

Random corruption in file created/updated from shell script on a singular client to NFS mount

We have bash script (job wrapper) that writes to a file, launches a job, then at job completion it appends to the file information about the job. The wrapper is run on one of several thousand batch nodes, but has only cropped up with several batch machines (I believe RHEL6) accessing one NFS server, and at least one known instance of a different batch job on a different batch node using a different NFS server. In all cases, only one client host is writing to the files in question. Some jobs take hours to run, others take minutes.
In the same time period that this has occurred, there seems to be 10-50 issues out of 100,000+ jobs.
Here is what I believe to effectively be the (distilled) version of the job wrapper:
#!/bin/bash
## cwd is /nfs/path/to/jobwd
## This file is /nfs/path/to/jobwd/job_wrapper
gotEXIT()
{
## end of script, however gotEXIT is called because we trap EXIT
END="EndTime: `date`\nStatus: Ended”
echo -e "${END}" >> job_info
cat job_info | sendmail jobtracker#example.com
}
trap gotEXIT EXIT
function jobSetVar { echo "job.$1: $2" >> job_info; }
export -f jobSetVar
MSG=“${email_metadata}\n${job_metadata}”
echo -e "${MSG}\nStatus: Started" | sendmail jobtracker#example.com
echo -e "${MSG}" > job_info
## At the job’s end, the output from `time` command is the first non-corrupt data in job_info
/usr/bin/time -f "Elapsed: %e\nUser: %U\nSystem: %S" -a -o job_info job_command
## 10-360 minutes later…
RC=$?
echo -e "ExitCode: ${RC}" >> job_info
So I think there are two possibilities:
echo -e "${MSG}" > job_info
This command throws out corrupt data.
/usr/bin/time -f "Elapsed: %e\nUser: %U\nSystem: %S" -a -o job_info job_command
This corrupts the existing data, then outputs it’s data correctly.
However, some job, but not all, call jobSetVar, which doesn't end up being corrupt.
So, I dig into time.c (from GNU time 1.7) to see when the file is open. To summarize, time.c is effectively this:
FILE *outfp;
void main (int argc, char** argv) {
const char **command_line;
RESUSE res;
/* internally, getargs opens “job_info”, so outfp = fopen ("job_info", "a”) */
command_line = getargs (argc, argv);
/* run_command doesn't care about outfp */
run_command (command_line, &res);
/* internally, summarize calls fprintf and putc on outfp FILE pointer */
summarize (outfp, output_format, command_line, &res); /
fflush (outfp);
}
So, time has FILE *outfp (job_info handle) open the entire time of the job. It then writes the summary at the end of the job, and then doesn’t actually appear to close the file (not sure if this is necessary with fflush?) I've no clue if bash also has the file handle open concurrently as well.
EDIT:
A corrupted file will typically end consist of the corrupted part, followed with the non-corrupted part, which may look like this:
The corrupted section, which would occur before the non-corrupted section, is typically largely a bunch of 0x0000, with maybe some cyclic garbage mixed in:
Here's an example hexdump:
40000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
00000000 00000000 C8B450AC 772B0000
01000000 00000000 C8B450AC 772B0000
[ 361 x 0x00]
Then, at the 409th byte, it continues with the non-corrupted section:
Elapsed: 879.07
User: 0.71
System: 31.49
ExitCode: 0
EndTime: Fri Dec 6 15:29:27 PST 2013
Status: Ended
Another file looks like this:
01000000 04000000 805443FC 9D2B0000 E04144FC 9D2B0000 E04144FC 9D2B0000
[96 x 0x00]
[Repeat above 3 times ]
01000000 04000000 805443FC 9D2B0000 E04144FC 9D2B0000 E04144FC 9D2B0000
Followed by the non corrupted section:
Elapsed: 12621.27
User: 12472.32
System: 40.37
ExitCode: 0
EndTime: Thu Nov 14 08:01:14 PST 2013
Status: Ended
There are other files that have much more random corruption sections, but more than a few were cyclical similar to above.
EDIT 2: The first email, sent from the echo -e statement goes through fine. The last email is never sent due to no email metadata from corruption. So MSG isn't corrupted at that point. It's assumed that job_info probably isn't corrupt at that point either, but we haven't been able to verify that yet. This is a production system which hasn't had major code modifications and I have verified through audit that no jobs have been ran concurrently which would touch this file. The problem seems to be somewhat recent (last 2 months), but it's possible it's happened before and slipped through. This error does prevent reporting which means jobs are considered failed, so they are typically resubmitted, but one user in specific has ~9 hour jobs in which this error is particularly frustrating. I wish I could come up with more info or a way of reproducing this at will, but I was hoping somebody has maybe seen a similar problem, especially recently. I don't manage the NFS servers, but I'll try to talk to the admins to see what updates the NFS servers at the time of these issues (RHEL6 I believe) were running.
Well, the emails corresponding to the corrupt job_info files should tell you what was in MSG (which will probably be business as usual). You may want to check how NFS is being run: there's a remote possibility that you are running NFS over UDP without checksums. That could explain some corrupt data. I also hear that UDP/TCP checksums are not strong enough and the data can still end up corrupt -- maybe you are hitting such a problem (I have seen corrupt packets slipping through a network stack at least once before, and I'm quite sure some checksumming was going on). Presumably the MSG goes out as a single packet and there might be something about it that makes checksum conflicts with the garbage you see more likely. Of course it could also be an NFS bug (client or server), a server-side filesystem bug, busted piece of RAM... possibilities are almost endless here (although I see how the fact that it's always MSG that gets corrupted makes some of those quite unlikely). The problem might be related to seeking (which happens during the append). You could also have a bug somewhere else in the system, causing multiple clients to open the same job_info file, making it a jumble.
You can also try using different file for 'time' output and then merge them together with job_info at the end of script. That may help to isolate problem further.
Shell opens 'job_info' file for writing, outputs MSG and then shall close its file descriptor before launching main job. 'time' program opens same file for append as stream and I suspect the seek over NFS is not done correctly which may cause that garbage. Can't explain why, but normally this shall not happen (and is not happening). Such rare occasions may point to some race condition somewhere, can be caused by out of sequence packet delivery (due to network latency spike) or retransmits which causes duplicate data, or a bug somewhere. At first look I would suspect some bug, but that bug may be triggered by some network behavior, e.g. unusually large delay or spike of packet loss.
File access between different processes are serialized by kernel, but for additional safeguard may be worth adding some artificial delays - sleep timers between outputs for example.
Network is not transparent, especially a large one. There can be WAN optimization devices which are known to cause application issues sometimes. CIFS and NFS are good candidates for optimization over WAN with local caching of filesystem operations. Might be worth looking for recent changes with network admins..
Another thing to try, although can be difficult due to rare occurrences is capture of interesting NFS sessions via tcpdump or wireshark. In really tough cases we do simultaneous capturing on both client and server side and then compare the protocol logic to prove that network is or is not working correctly. That's a whole topic in itself, requires thorough preparation and luck but usually a last resort of desperate troubleshooting :)
It turns out this was actually another issue altogether, apparently to do with an out-of-date page being written to disk.
A bug fix was supplied to the linux-nfs implementation:
http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-nfs/msg41357.html

Hex Dump Specific Parts of File - Bash

I'm trying to write a bash script to audit hard drives that have been wiped to ensure the wiping system is working properly. I would like to find a way to hex dump specific parts of a drive without having to hex dump the entire drive and extract the parts I'd like (as this seems to run for too long to make the script worth writing). Ideally, I'd be able to grab parts from the beginning, middle, and end of the drive.
I would like to take the output of the hex dump and check it for the existence of only one character (indicating the drive has been successfully wiped). This part, I can handle, but I thought it may affect any advice I may get.
I've used head piped into xxd to get the beginning of the file which has worked, but I'm still stuck on the other parts. I've tried using tail to just get the end of the drive, but that doesn't seem to work quickly either. Is it possible to do this efficiently? Possibly using dd or something else and pipe it into a hex editor? I've looked through options for xxd as well as hexdump to no avail. If someone could point me in the right direction, it would be greatly appreciated!
xxd has options to skip a ways into the file (-s) and dump a limited length (-l). If you use its plain hex (-p) option, you may be able to use grep to find any anomalies:
$ xxd -s 8192 -l 256 -p /dev/disk3s2 | grep [^0]
000000010000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
000000000000000000000000300000000000000800000000000000000000
dbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdb
dbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdb
dbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdb
od has similar skip (-j) and limit length (-N). Similarly, dd has skip= and count= (although these are counted in blocks, not bytes; you can change the block size with bs=).
EDIT: Since xxd -p is giving weird results (not stopping at what should be the end of the device), I'd recommend running some tests to figure out what's going on. First, back up anything important on the computer, because if something is weird at the device access level, it's possible that some of these tests might overwrite something unexpected, possibly even on another disk.
Next, try dumping to the end of the device with different tools, and see if they all behave the same way:
xxd -s 65451982336 /dev/sdb | more # This *should* dump 512 bytes (32 lines) then stop, but apparently keeps going
od -xv -j 65451982336 /dev/sdb | more # This also *should* dump 512 bytes then stop
dd if=/dev/sdb skip=127835903 | xxd | more # This again should do the same thing (note that the skip value is in 512-byte blocks)
Do the other tools read past what fdisk reports as the end of the disk? If all three read more data, I'm going with the "fdisk is wrong/misleading" answer. You can test further by writing some nonzero data past the "end" and seeing what the results are:
dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sdb seek=127835903 count=2
...then repeat the various dump commands. If they show two blocks (=64 lines) of random data followed by zeroes, I'm pretty sure the device is bigger than you think it is.
I am not near my shell, but something along these lines should get you started:
dd if=/dev/hda1 | hexdump -C | grep [^00]
will print all non-zero bytes.
dd if=/dev/hda1 | od -x -j100
will give you a hexadecimal dump with offsets, starting 100 bytes in.

fastest hashing in a unix environment?

I need to examine the output of a certain script 1000s of times on a unix platform and check if any of it has changed from before.
I've been doing this:
(script_stuff) | md5sum
and storing this value. I actually don't really need "md5", JUST a simple hash function which I can compare against a stored value to see if its changed. Its okay if there are an occassional false positive.
Is there anything better than md5sum that works faster and generates a fairly usable hash value? The script itself generates a few lines of text - maybe 10-20 on average to max 100 or so.
I had a look at fast md5sum on millions of strings in bash/ubuntu - that's wonderful, but I can't compile a new program. Need a system utility... :(
Additional "background" details:
I've been asked to monitor the DNS record of a set of 1000 or so domains and immediately call certain other scripts if there has been any change. I intend to do a dig xyz +short statement and hash its output and store that, and then check it against a previously stored value. Any change will trigger the other script, otherwise it just goes on. Right now, we're planning on using cron for a set of these 1000, but can think completely diffeerently for "seriously heavy" usage - ~20,000 or so.
I have no idea what the use of such a system would be, I'm just doing this as a job for someone else...
The cksum utility calculates a non-cryptographic CRC checksum.
How big is the output you're checking? A hundred lines max. I'd just save the entire original file then use cmp to see if it's changed. Given that a hash calculation will have to read every byte anyway, the only way you'll get an advantage from a checksum type calculation is if the cost of doing it is less than reading two files of that size.
And cmp won't give you any false positives or negatives :-)
pax> echo hello >qq1.txt
pax> echo goodbye >qq2.txt
pax> cp qq1.txt qq3.txt
pax> cmp qq1.txt qq2.txt >/dev/null
pax> echo $?
1
pax> cmp qq1.txt qq3.txt >/dev/null
pax> echo $?
0
Based on your question update:
I've been asked to monitor the DNS record of a set of 1000 or so domains and immediately call certain other scripts if there has been any change. I intend to do a dig xyz +short statement and hash its output and store that, and then check it against a previously stored value. Any change will trigger the other script, otherwise it just goes on. Right now, we're planning on using cron for a set of these 1000, but can think completely diffeerently for "seriously heavy" usage - ~20,000 or so.
I'm not sure you need to worry too much about the file I/O. The following script executed dig microsoft.com +short 5000 times first with file I/O then with output to /dev/null (by changing the comments).
#!/bin/bash
rm -rf qqtemp
mkdir qqtemp
((i = 0))
while [[ $i -ne 5000 ]] ; do
#dig microsoft.com +short >qqtemp/microsoft.com.$i
dig microsoft.com +short >/dev/null
((i = i + 1))
done
The elapsed times at 5 runs each are:
File I/O | /dev/null
----------+-----------
3:09 | 1:52
2:54 | 2:33
2:43 | 3:04
2:49 | 2:38
2:33 | 3:08
After removing the outliers and averaging, the results are 2:49 for the file I/O and 2:45 for the /dev/null. The time difference is four seconds for 5000 iterations, only 1/1250th of a second per item.
However, since an iteration over the 5000 takes up to three minutes, that's how long it will take maximum to detect a problem (a minute and a half on average). If that's not acceptable, you need to move away from bash to another tool.
Given that a single dig only takes about 0.012 seconds, you should theoretically do 5000 in sixty seconds assuming your checking tool takes no time at all. You may be better off doing something like this in Perl and using an associative array to store the output from dig.
Perl's semi-compiled nature means that it will probably run substantially faster than a bash script and Perl's fancy stuff will make the job a lot easier. However, you're unlikely to get that 60-second time much lower just because that's how long it takes to run the dig commands.

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