Thursday, January 1, 2015

Potential #root Vulnerability on *'nix via man --html=browser

man --html=firefox

Man is owned and grouped root on my system, when you open a man page with the --html option you are root in the web browser.

You can then browse to any page and save a file it will be owned root and even create new directories with Firefox all owned as root. 

I hope this isn't as big of a security hole as it seems to be.

As a remedy on my system I have changed the ownership of /usr/bin/man to a less privileged user and the man command still functions as expected.

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