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Bug 1665679

Summary: pam_lastlog ignores PAM_SILENT when configured with showfailed
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Reporter: Nir Soffer <nsoffer>
Component: pamAssignee: Tomas Mraz <tmraz>
Status: CLOSED ERRATA QA Contact: Dalibor Pospíšil <dapospis>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 8.0CC: aparsons, dapospis
Target Milestone: pre-dev-freezeKeywords: AutoVerified, Reopened, Triaged
Target Release: ---Flags: pm-rhel: mirror+
Hardware: Unspecified   
OS: Unspecified   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: pam-1.3.1-5.el8 Doc Type: If docs needed, set a value
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2020-04-28 16:42:43 UTC Type: Bug
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:
Bug Depends On:    
Bug Blocks: 1664147, 1666215, 1666603    

Description Nir Soffer 2019-01-12 14:55:43 UTC
Description of problem:

After fixing sudo to use PAM_SILENT (see bug 1664147), it does not show last
login info when running a command.

But if there was a bad login attempt just before running the sudo command, pam_lastlog will warn about the failed login attempt, modifying the output of
the command.

    $ echo expected | sudo cat
    Last failed login: Sat Jan 12 09:35:29 EST 2019 from gateway on ssh:notty
    There were 3 failed login attempts since the last successful login.
    expected

This breaks use cases when command output is consumed by another
program. An example real use case is running LVM commands using sudo.
LVM output is built to be consumed by programs and programs assume
that sudo is not modifying the output in any way.

Here is example failure that may be caused by this issue:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1662449


How to reproduce the issue:

1. Install sudo upstream with fix for bug 1664147.

2. Configure sudo with (default in 7.6?):

$ cat /etc/pam.d/sudo
... 
session    include      system-auth

3. Configure system-auth is using pam_lastlog plugin:

$ cat /etc/pam.d/system-auth
... 
session     required      pam_lastlog.so showfailed

4. Perform bad login attempt:

$ ssh root.122.246
root.122.246's password: 
Permission denied, please try again.
root.122.246's password: 
Permission denied, please try again.
root.122.246's password: 
root.122.246: Permission denied (publickey,gssapi-keyex,gssapi-with-mic,password).

5. Run command with sudo

$ echo expected | sudo cat
Last failed login: Sat Jan 12 09:35:29 EST 2019 from gateway on ssh:notty
There were 3 failed login attempts since the last successful login.
expected

The program running sudo is broken by the unexpected messages about failed
login.

The messages about failed login are also not helping anyone or improving 
the security of the system since sudo is run by a program, not by the system
administrator. If a program is broken by the failed login warnings, this can
be used to preform denial of service attack.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
$ rpm -qa | grep pam
pam-devel-1.1.8-22.el7.x86_64
pam-1.1.8-22.el7.x86_64

How reproducible:
Always

There are two issues here:
1. pam does not respect PAM_SILENT
2. even if pam will respect PAM_SILENT, the warning about failed logins
   are consumed by running sudo, and the next real login will not see the 
   warnings. Ideally sudo will not consume either last login or bad login
   messages unless running a shell (e.g sudo -s).

The first issue, respecting PAM_SILENT was fixed upstream in:
https://github.com/linux-pam/linux-pam/pull/91

Comment 2 Tomas Mraz 2019-01-14 07:57:30 UTC
This is not a real blocker for bug 1664147.

The PAM_SILENT flag is just an indication and not a
hard-stop. If some application must not ever print something to users
it has to ensure it by itself and not blindly output any messages that
it receives from the PAM modules.

If pam_lastlog used stdout/stderr to print out the message, it would be
a bug. As it uses PAM conversation function, the application has all
the power to not output anything if it is not supposed to output
anything.

In my opinion regardless of my acceptance of the upstream PAM patch
this should be fixed on RHEL-7 strictly in sudo.

Comment 5 Simo Sorce 2019-02-11 15:41:39 UTC
This issue was not selected to be included either in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7 because it is seen either as low or moderate impact to a small amount of use-cases. The next release will be in Maintenance Support 1 Phase, which means that qualified Critical and Important Security errata advisories (RHSAs) and Urgent Priority Bug Fix errata advisories (RHBAs) may be released as they become available. We will now close this issue, but if you believe that it qualifies for the Maintenance Support 1 Phase, please re-open; otherwise we recommend moving the request to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 if applicable.

Comment 17 errata-xmlrpc 2020-04-28 16:42:43 UTC
Since the problem described in this bug report should be
resolved in a recent advisory, it has been closed with a
resolution of ERRATA.

For information on the advisory, and where to find the updated
files, follow the link below.

If the solution does not work for you, open a new bug report.

https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2020:1780