# Escaping seccomp

## Lecture

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Escaping seccomp
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## Breaking out

Recall that we have discussed the **"trust boundary"** in the "Into the Jail" section: when a child process needs to perform a privileged action, it must **ask the parent process for permission**. In other word, to do anything useful, a sandboxed process needs to **communicate** with the privileged process. That is, the sandboxed process needs to use **some** of the syscalls. This relaxation opens up some attack vectors:

1. **Permissive policies**
2. **Syscall confusion**
3. **Kernel vulnerabilities** (in the syscall handlers)

## Attack Vector 1: Permissive Policies

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System calls are complex, and there are a lot of them. Developers might avoid breaking functionality by erring on the side of permissiveness.
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A well-known example is `ptrace()`. Depending on system configuration, allowing the `ptrace()` system call could let a sandboxed process to "puppet" a **non-sandboxed** process.

Some less well-known effects include:

* `sendmsg()` can transfer file descriptors between processes.
* `prctl()` has bizarre possible effects.
* `process_vm_writev()` allows direct access to other process' memory.

## Attack Vector 2: Syscall Confusion

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Policies that allow both 32-bit and 64-bit syscalls can fail to properly sandbox one or the other mode.
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Many 64-bit architectures are **backwards compatible** with their 32-bit ancestors. For example:

* amd64 / x86\_64 => x86
* aarch64 => arm
* mips64 => mips
* powerpc64 => ppc
* sparc64 => sparc

On some systems (including amd64), you can switch between 32-bit mode and 64-bit mode in the same process, so the kernel must be ready for either. However, **syscalls numbers differ between architectures**, including 32-bit and 64-bit variants of the same architecture. For example, the syscall number for `execve` is `0xb` on x86 and `0x3b` on x86-64; the syscall number for `exit` is `0x1` on x86 and `0x3c` on x86-64. This behavior causes the potential **"syscall confusion"** when the both 32-bit and 64-bit syscalls are allowed.

## Attack Vector 3: Kernel Vulnerabilities

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Even if the seccomp sandbox is correctly configured, attackers can still interact with whitelisted syscalls.
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As long as attackers can use some of the syscalls, they are able to **trigger vulnerabilities in the kernel**. For real-world examples, check out Chrome sandbox escape exploit:

{% embed url="<https://github.com/allpaca/chrome-sbx-db>" %}
Chrome Sandbox Escape PoCs
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## Attack Vector 4: Side Channel Attacks

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**Think:** what is your goal as an attacker? Is it always code execution?
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Not really. Often, your goal is **data exfiltration** (like `/flag`!). Even if you can't directly communicate with the outside world, often you can send **"smoke signals"**:

* Runtime of a process (see `sleep(x)` system call) can convey a lot of data.
* Clean termination or a crash? This can convey one bit.
* Return value of a program (`exit(x)`) can convey one byte.

For a real-world example, **attackers use DNS queries to bypass network egress filters.** As long as you can communicate **1 bit**, you can repeat the attack to get more and more bits!
