We discovered a vulnerability in Sudo’s get_process_ttyname() for Linux: this function opens “/proc/[pid]/stat” (man proc) and reads the device number of the tty from field 7 (tty_nr). Unfortunately, these fields are space-separated and field 2 (comm, the filename of the command) can contain spaces (CVE-2017-1000367).
For example, if we execute Sudo through the symlink “./ 1 “, get_process_ttyname() calls sudo_ttyname_dev() to search for the non-existent tty device number “1” in the built-in search_devs[].
Next, sudo_ttyname_dev() calls the function sudo_ttyname_scan() to search for this non-existent tty device number “1” in a breadth-first traversal of “/dev”.
Last, we exploit this function during its traversal of the world-writable “/dev/shm”: through this vulnerability, a local user can pretend that his tty is any character device on the filesystem, and after two race conditions, he can pretend that his tty is any file on the filesystem.
On an SELinux-enabled system, if a user is Sudoer for a command that does not grant him full root privileges, he can overwrite any file on the filesystem (including root-owned files) with his command’s output, because relabel_tty() (in src/selinux.c) calls open(O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) on his tty and dup2()s it to the command’s stdin, stdout, and stderr. This allows any Sudoer user to obtain full root privileges.