The 2020 Pwnie Nominee For Best Privilege Escalation Bug

Qualys Security Advisory Team

OpenBSD through 6.6 allows local users to escalate to root because a check for LD_LIBRARY_PATH in setuid programs can be defeated by setting a very small RLIMIT_DATA resource limit. When executing chpass or passwd (which are setuid root), _dl_setup_env in ld.so tries to strip LD_LIBRARY_PATH from the environment, but fails when it cannot allocate memory. Thus, the attacker is able to execute their own library code as root.

Local Privilege Escalation in OpenBSD’s dynamic loader