Security Tips

Here is a short summary of security recommendations for the YaST developers. This is very likely not a full list, feel free to add more tips.

Obtaining Root Privileges

YaST needs to be already started under the root account, there is no switch from an unprivileged user to the privileged one at runtime.

Some modules can be run under the unprivileged user, but they do not support switching to the privileged user later. That means they usually work only in read-only mode and do not allow to change anything.

The result is that there should not be any security problem in this area.

Sensitive Data

Registration codes, access tokens, private keys, passwords (in URLs as well!) or other sensitive data should never be logged to the y2log. Although reading the y2log file requires root access it can be attached to bugzilla where everybody could read it.

  • Be careful when logging with .inspect: The result might contain confidential internal object data.
  • For logging URLs use the URL.HidePassword() method

Temporary Files

Never use fixed or predictable names when writing to the /tmp directory (or in general any world-writable directory).

If you write to a predictable file, the attacker could prepare a symlink with that name in advance pointing to some other file. Later when the user would run the code the other file would be overwritten.

Non-root Writable Directories

This is similar to the temporary files section above but it is about /home or similar directories.

To avoid a possible TOCTOU timing issue (CVE) you need to atomically check and create the file.

  • Use O_CREAT, O_EXCL, O_WRONLY flags when creating the file. In this case write fails if the file already exists. See man 2 open for more details.
  • Create a unique file on the same file system and use link to set the final target name. See man 2 link and man 2 open for more details.



# raises Errno::EEXIST if the file already exists, File::WRONLY | File::CREAT | File::EXCL) do |file|
  file.write contents


int fd = open(file, O_CREAT | O_EXCL | O_WRONLY);
if ((fd < 0) && (errno == EEXIST))
    // the file already exists


Always prefer HTTPS over HTTP. It ensures you really connect to the intended server and the communication is encrypted so nobody can read it or modify it.

Do not disable the peer verification. If you still need to do it (e.g. because of a self-signed certificate), always ask the user for confirmation and display the certificate details so the user can at least verify the certificate fingerprint.

SSL Certificates

Downloading and importing a SSL certificate from an insecure source (e.g. HTTP) does not improve security; to the contrary, it makes it even worse.

If you need to import a certificate into the system, the user should verify the certificate details (including the fingerprint) and confirm the import.

Package Download and Installation

Downloading and installing packages requires extra security checks. That includes repository meta-data verification and RPM signature verification. Fortunately libzypp already handles that for us.

  • Always use libzypp functionality (through yast2-pkg-bindings), never download or install the packages manually.

Running External Tools

If you can avoid it, do not use external commands. In particular, do not use external commands that have a good and easy-to-use Ruby counterpart. I.e. don’t pipe the output of one command to any of grep, sed, tr, cut. Simply use plain Ruby for those things. Also, don’t use ls or find to find files. Use Ruby Dir and Find instead.

If you really need to use external commands:

The shell injection vulnerability is usually not a problem as YaST is already running as root and the input comes from the root user. So privilege escalation should not be possible.

But usually the problem happens when using a file with spaces in the file name or or the user input contains some special characters like <&%{}>. Then the module probably does not work as expected or can fail.

Also when executing external tools, always use the absolute path to avoid a file not found error when $PATH variable is not set properly or to avoid running possibly malicious replacements when the path contains the . directory (which is not recommended).

Another issue might be with the order of the $PATH components, e.g. /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin prefers /usr/local/bin which might also be problematic.

  • Use the Yast::Execute module or the cheetah gem directly for running external commands
  • Use the Shellwords.escape Ruby method, e.g. /bin/rpm -q #{Shellwords.escape(user_input)}
  • Use the absolute path, e.g. /bin/rpm Note: The very old YaST approach was NOT using the absolute path. This has been changed. But it might be still used in some places; feel free to fix that.

Attack Vectors for External Commands

Malicious Programs in $PATH

If $PATH contains any directory where unprivileged users may have write access or where they can mount (!) external media to (USB sticks, NFS / Samba shares), they might put malicious programs there that are named just like something that is called by YaST; somebody might put their own grep or cp or whatever there that may not only do what the original does, but exploit the privileges of the caller (i.e. root).

Remember that YaST is always running as root!

Whoever can make YaST call his binaries can get root access very easily.

Don’t forget shell built-ins like echo and test, and remember that [ is just an alias for test. There is a counterpart for each of them in /bin or /usr/bin.

Malicious Programs Disguised as Plain Files

If you use the content of directories as part of a command line, you need to be safe against files that have names that are weird, but legal. In a Linux/Unix environment, there are few characters that are explicitly forbidden in file names; the slash (/) is definitely forbidden, everything else is in most cases just weird, but permitted.

A file may also be named something like

; rm -rf * or "; rm -rf * or "; chown root rootshell; chmod u+s rootshell

Of course this will make the original command fail, but the malicious command that follows will succeed, so the damage is already done by the time anybody notices that something is wrong.

Remember that it only takes one single of those commands to be executed with root permissions to cause damage. Somebody might plug his USB stick in with whole directories of such commands with various combinations of different types of quotes.

So if you read a directory’s content with Ruby or with C++ or with one script and command and just use those names that we found as they are, you might easily build command lines that by accident execute any of those malicious commands.

Malicious Commands in Device Names / Mount Points

Any of the above can also happen with device names (OEM strings!) or mount points (volume labels!). A USB stick might contain this.

Just look at /dev/disk/by-label and /dev/disk/by-id to get an idea.

Volume labels are commonly used in udev rules as mount points.

Malicious Commands Hidden in Other Places

All files that you read, all data that you process that comes from the outside, all user input are datea that cannot be trusted, so you need to make sure to properly escape all of that. The same attack vectors as with filenames apply to all those things.

Special Caveat: Escaping Single Quotes in the Shell

In most programming contexts, when you have a quote inside a quote, it only matters if it is the same kind of quote, and then you simply prefix it with a backslash:

"Value: \"#{value}"\" (changed)"

The shell is weird in that aspect. When you have a quote inside a quote, you need to terminate the string, then add the quote escaped with a backslash, then start a new string. So the above example would be

"Value: "\"value\"" (changed)"

This is very unexpected for most people, and so it is frequently done wrong.

Shell-Escaping vs. Regexp-Escaping

While the shell has special treatment for some types of characters, regular expressions have some other types of characters. Sometimes it’s hard to get it right for both cases.

Fortunately, regexps typically consist of a fixed part (that’s where usually the characters go that have special meaning for the regexps) and sometimes of a variable part.

So, for most grep calls (which should be avoided in the first place - see above), it should be used something like this:

/usr/bin/egrep '^[0-9]+\s+'#{foo.shellescape}'bar$'

So if the foo variable contains characters that need to be shell-escaped, they are properly escaped, and the egrep command receives one single string as the argument. Remember that the shell consumes the quotes and any backslashes outside of quotes, so even if the complete command expands to something like

/usr/bin/egrep '^[0-9]+\s+'very\ weird\'stuff'bar$'

the egrep command gets

^[0-9]+\s+very weird'stuffbar$

which is the expected thing.

Notice that there is also Ruby Regexp.escape which can be combined with this. The problem is just that there are many different variations of the Regexp syntax, and Ruby Regexp.escape of course supports Ruby’s own variation. It’s slightly different for grep, egrep, sed, perl. This is something to watch out for. And this is also another reason to do that inside Ruby and not call external tools like grep / egrep / sed; then you can safely simply use Ruby Regexp.escape.

Passing Sensitive Data to External Tools

Sometimes you need to pass sensitive data like password to an external tool.

  • Pass the data through a pipe connected to STDIN of the child process if it is possible to provide the data via the standard input.

The other options are less secure or even insecure:

  • Save the data into a file, let the tool read the file
    • The file content is kept on the disk even after unlinking the file
    • Overwriting the file content might not help on some file systems (see man shred)
    • A FS snapshot might be created before removing the file
  • Pass the data on the command line - this is very insecure as it can be displayed in the output of the ps command, so it could be read by anybody on the local machine. (Exception: This could be possibly used during the initial installation where only the installer is running and no other user is logged in. But make sure this is not used in the installed system.)



# Real world example from yast2-bootloader when using external utility to get
# the salted hash of a password. The utility asks twice for the password, so we
# need to get it twice with newlines.

# old insecure way with password on cmdline. DO NOT USE IT!
quoted_password = Yast::String.Quote(password)
result = Yast::WFM.Execute(YAST_BASH_PATH,
  "echo '#{quoted_password}\n#{quoted_password}\n' | LANG=C grub2-mkpasswd-pbkdf2")

# secure way with Yast::Execute
result = Yast::Execute.locally("/usr/bin/grub2-mkpasswd-pbkdf2",
  env:    { "LANG" => "C" },
  stdin:  "#{password}\n#{password}\n",
  stdout: :capture)


The debugging features might also potentially affect security or leak some sensitive data.

  • If you need to use a separate log file (not the standard y2log) make sure the file has root-only access.
  • Use a directory accessible only to root. Otherwise avoid file collisions; see the temporary files section.

When using a debugger (or any other special debugging features) make sure that they are disabled by default.

  • Enable the debugging features only on user request; use a command line option or an environment variable.
  • If the tool allows remote control, then enable the remote access also only on request. And if possible, by default allow only local access via the loopback device (localhost/

See more details in the debugging document about the integrated Ruby debugger support in YaST.

Random Numbers

Linux has two devices generating random data: /dev/urandom (non-blocking) and cryptographically secure /dev/random (can block if there is not enough entropy).

Similarly in Ruby there is a simple rand() call and SecureRandom class providing cryptographically secure methods for generating random values.

  • Use the simple method when generating non-security related random values, e.g. a random host name, random time out, etc.
  • For security related values (access keys, tokens), use the cryptographically secure sources.

Further Reading

YaST Security Audit Fixes: Lessons Learned and Reminder