Dirty COW - Privilege Escalation (CVE-2016-5195)

This project demonstrates a privilege escalation using the Dirty COW vulnerability in a virtual machine with Ubuntu Server 16.04.1 and kernel 4.4.0-31-generic.

🔧 Environment

• Victim machine: Ubuntu 16.04.1 vulnerable (student without privileges)
• Attacker machine: Kali Linux with Docker installed

🐮 Vulnerability

Dirty COW (CVE-2016-5195) is a race condition in the memory subsystem of the Linux kernel. It allows an unprivileged user to modify read-only files and escalate privileges to root.

🚀 Steps performed

1. Verified the vulnerable kernel on the victim machine (uname -a)
2. Prepared the Docker environment on Kali with Ubuntu 16.04.1
3. Created the dirty.cpp file with the exploit code (Exploit-DB ID: 40847)
4. Compiled the binary inside the container with g++
5. Exited the container and copied the binary to Kali
6. Transferred the binary to the victim machine using scp
7. On the victim machine, I gave it execute permissions and ran it:
   root@kitploit:~

   chmod +x dirty
   ./dirty
   

8. The exploit returned a root password (dirtyCowFun) and I accessed as root with that root account.

✅ Result

The exploit was successful. Root access was obtained from a limited user.

📁 Repository contents

• dirty: compiled binary of the exploit
• README.md: this explanatory file