Privilege Escalation

gce-compute-image is vulnerable to privilege escation. The vulnerability allows a user that is only granted the role “roles/compute.osLogin” to escalate privileges to root. Using their membership to the “adm” group, users with this role are able to read the DHCP XID from the systemd journal. Using the DHCP XID, it is then possible to set the IP address and hostname of the instance to any value, which is then stored in /etc/hosts. An attacker can then point metadata.google.internal to an arbitrary IP address and impersonate the GCE metadata server which make it is possible to instruct the OS Login PAM module to grant administrative privileges.