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Abusing Ubuntu 24.04 features for root privilege escalation

With the recent release of Ubuntu 24.04, we at Snyk Security Labs thought it would be interesting to examine the latest version of this Linux distribution to see if we could find any interesting privilege escalation vulnerabilities.

The problems begin when an attacker is able to compromise the user’s session, potentially through social engineering to execute a payload, or other exploitation ( I may not have Chrome full RCE vulnerabilities, but they’ve happened before). My assumption, based on previous experience and the strace output, was that the bind call return value would be checked, and if there was a symlink present, cupsd would quit with an error. A special shout out to the cups team who were able to produce a patch on the same day as the report which both fixes the direct vulnerability but also added additional security measures, which would have made it doubly difficult to exploit in the first place.

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