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February 28, 2007

Need to run as root?

Every now and then, I find myself in a locked down account on a restricted access box where I need to run something as root.

Say, for example, you were running BigBrother (why?) on AIX (why?) and you need to run bootinfo -r. In this case the AIX partition is a NIM - so no sudo available....

What you need is a little C program:

main()

{

    setuid(0);

    seteuid(0);

    setgid(0);

    seteuid(0);

    system("/usr/sbin/bootinfo -r");

}

Note the full pathname used in the system call and the lack of externally passed variables - we don't want to make too big a hole here...

Compile this (obviously not on the NIM because there is no installed compiler). Install it somewhere safe - so that root and bigbrother are the only users that can access it and then:

chown 0:0 filename

chmod a+rx filename

chmod ug+s filename

Of course, if you are more security concious, you should have checked the userid in the C program as well....

Posted by Ozguru at February 28, 2007 07:00 AM