Subject: bug#32772: TOCTOU bug in chmod

From: Jeff Epler <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2018 07:49:19 -0500

When a directory is replaced with a symlink at a critical moment, `chmod`
will perform the unintended action of changing the mode of the linked-to
file or directory.  I tested in coreutils 8.26 on debian stretch, but
believe that the current version 8.30 and the development version are
vulnerable.

Basically, when chmodat is used here
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/tree/src/chmod.c?id=694d10b71e418ef4ea68847185b73544fe03eae2#n273
it will dereference the symlink.  Changing to lchmodat should resolve the
problem, except that on GNU/Linux, it appears this works by passing
AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW to fchmodat, but that flag is noted as "not currently
implemented" in the local man page ("release 4.10 of the Linux man-pages
project").  Consequently, I'm not even sure there is a correct fix
available on this common platform.

Here are my steps to reproduce, which involve using gdb to pause the
execution of chmod while the substitution is made, so that the window of
opportunity is made as large as possible.  I have followed the steps
manually several times, so I hope they are correct and don't have any
transcription errors.

### Note the ironic unsafe use of /tmp
$ umask 077
$ mkdir -p /tmp/a/b/c; touch /tmp/a/b/c/d; touch /tmp/donttouchthis
### /tmp/donttouchthis is mode 0600 here
$ ls -l /tmp/donttouchthis
$ gdb --args chmod -R u=u /tmp/a
(gdb) b fchmodat
(gdb) run
Breakpoint 1, fchmodat (fd=-100, file=0x5555557640f0 "/tmp/a", mode=493,
(gdb) condition 1 !strcmp(file, "c")
(gdb) continue
Breakpoint 1, fchmodat (fd=5, file=0x55555576d6f8 "c", mode=493, flag=0)
(gdb) shell cd /tmp/a/b && mv c noc && ln -s /tmp/donttouchthis c
(gdb) continue
/bin/chmod: cannot read directory '/tmp/a/b/c': Not a directory
[Inferior 1 (process 13718) exited with code 01]
(gdb) shell ls -l /tmp/donttouchthis
### donttouchthis is mode 0700 here, the old mode of /tmp/a/b/c!

Note how the mode of /tmp/donttouchthis has been changed from 0600 to 0700,
because it got the mode of the directory '/tmp/a/b/c'.