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Old 05-01-2014, 06:04 AM   #1
wzis
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could SystemTap be used by malicious person to steal ssh password easily ?


Brendan Gregg has a sample dtrace script to show how the dtrace can be used to steal ssh password or passphrase easily, so people should be careful if someone is running a dtrace script on your system. For same reason I want to know whether the systemtap would also allow malicious person to easily steal ssh password, if so, is there a sample SystemTap program which shows that capability? Just need that to confirm whether we should prohibit user to use the tool on production box under normal situation.

Last edited by wzis; 05-01-2014 at 06:25 AM.
 
Old 05-01-2014, 08:39 AM   #2
fche
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use different privilege levels

Normally, systemtap is an administrative tool that gives the sysadmin (root)
full power to observe and affect kernel / userspace behaviour, including
indeed spying on ttys (see the ttyspy.stp example). You would definitely
not want to hand such power to everyone, just as you wouldn't hand out root
passwords to everyone.

Systemtap also has lower-privilege modes ("stapusr"), which are carefully
limited to allow people to only observe and affect their own userspace processes.
These limitations exclude the ability to spy on other users or on the kernel.
It takes a little one-time setup work for the sysadmin to get this sort of
operation enabled (because it relies on network services & cryptography); see
the privilege-related sections in stap(1) and stap-server(8), and the
README.unprivileged file in the systemtap source/binary distributions.
 
2 members found this post helpful.
Old 05-01-2014, 09:46 AM   #3
sundialsvcs
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Furthermore ... you should never be using passwords with ssh anyway. You should always be using keys, and encrypting those keys.
 
Old 05-03-2014, 06:18 PM   #4
wzis
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Thanks for the clear answer!

Quote:
Originally Posted by fche View Post
Normally, systemtap is an administrative tool that gives the sysadmin (root)
full power to observe and affect kernel / userspace behaviour, including
indeed spying on ttys (see the ttyspy.stp example). You would definitely
not want to hand such power to everyone, just as you wouldn't hand out root
passwords to everyone.
Thanks
 
Old 05-03-2014, 07:43 PM   #5
fche
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Registered: May 2014
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secure ssh not secure in face of kernel-resident monitoring

Quote:
Originally Posted by sundialsvcs View Post
"you should never be using passwords with ssh anyway. You should always be using keys, and encrypting those keys."
Those precautions don't do anything against an attacker who has control over the kernel. The moment the ssh client gets to decrypt those keys, a kernel-resident tool can grab them.

Last edited by fche; 05-03-2014 at 07:44 PM.
 
  


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