this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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If you containerize, the application (malware) will run under the user configured in the image, unless you override it, and in a separate mount namespace, unless you change that, which makes the "alias sudo" trick extremely unlikely.
Even running under a separate user anyway prevents almost fully the attack you mention, unless the separate user has root privileges or the DAC_OVERRIDE capability is assigned to the binary (assigning it requires CAP_SYS_ADMIN).
In short, the attack you mention is a common persistence and privilege escalation vector, which is relatively easy to detect (watch for changes to shell profiles), although preventing it requires some care. I just want to point out that in single-user machines (e.g. personal computers) escalating to root is anyway fairly unnecessary, given that all the juicy stuff (ssh keys, data, etc.) is anyway probably running under/owned by that user.
Yep! You can also get pretty far even without containers. At the end of the day containers are just sandboxing using namespaces, and
systemdcan expose that pretty trivially for services, and tools like bubble wrap / flatpak let you do it for desktop apps. In an ideal world every package would only use the namespaces it needs, and stuff like this would largely not be a concern.