GameOver(lay): Two Severe Linux Vulnerabilities Impact 40% of Ubuntu Users

Cybersecurity scientists have disclosed two substantial-severity security flaws in the Ubuntu kernel that could pave the way for local privilege escalation attacks.

Cloud security company Wiz, in a report shared with The Hacker News, reported the easy-to-exploit shortcomings have the possible to effects 40% of Ubuntu customers.

“The impacted Ubuntu variations are prevalent in the cloud as they serve as the default operating techniques for numerous [cloud service providers],” security researchers Sagi Tzadik and Shir Tamari reported.

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The vulnerabilities – tracked as CVE-2023-32629 and 2023-2640 (CVSS scores: 7.8) and dubbed GameOver(lay) – are current in a module identified as OverlayFS and come up as a consequence of inadequate permissions checks in selected eventualities, enabling a area attacker to obtain elevated privileges.

Overlay Filesystem refers to a union mount file method that would make it possible to incorporate several directory trees or file systems into a single, unified filesystem.

A short description of the two flaws is beneath –

• CVE-2023-2640 – On Ubuntu kernels carrying each c914c0e27eb0 and “UBUNTU: SAUCE: overlayfs: Skip permission checking for dependable.overlayfs.* xattrs,” an unprivileged consumer could set privileged extended attributes on the mounted data files, foremost them to be established on the higher information devoid of the ideal security checks.
• CVE-2023-32629 – Nearby privilege escalation vulnerability in Ubuntu Kernels overlayfs ovl_duplicate_up_meta_inode_information skip authorization checks when calling ovl_do_setxattr on Ubuntu kernels

In a nutshell, GameOver(lay) tends to make it doable to “craft an executable file with scoped file abilities and trick the Ubuntu Kernel into copying it to a unique

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site with unscoped abilities, granting any one who executes it root-like privileges.”

Next accountable disclosure, the vulnerabilities have been set by Ubuntu as of July 24, 2023.

The conclusions underscore the actuality that subtle improvements in the Linux kernel introduced by Ubuntu could have unforeseen implications, Wiz CTO and co-founder Ami Luttwak stated in a assertion shared with the publication.

“Each vulnerabilities are unique to Ubuntu kernels considering that they stemmed from Ubuntu’s specific adjustments to the OverlayFS module,” the scientists reported, adding the issues are comparable to other vulnerabilities these as CVE-2016-1576, CVE-2021-3493, CVE-2021-3847, and CVE-2023-0386.

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