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This is pretty relevant for things like claude-code, which has a fairly rudimentary way of dealing with permissions with block-lists and allow-lists.

I once accidentally gave my claude "powershell" permissions in one session, and after that any time it found it was blocked from using a tool, e.g. git, it would write a powershell script that did the same thing and execute the script to work around the blocked permission.

Obviously no sane system would have "powershell" in a generic allow-list, but you could imagine some discrepancy in allowed levels between tools which can be worked around with the techniques on this page.

Concrete example:

A few years back, our support team needed to do some network capture with tcpdump. The quick and natural way to allow that was to add a sudo rule for it, with opened arguments (I know it's a bit risky, but tcp port and nic could change).

Looks good enough? Well no...

With tcpdump, you can specify a compress command with the "-z" option. But nothing prevents you from running a "special" compress command and completely take over the server:

> sudo tcpdump -i any -z '/home/despicable_me/evil_cmd.sh' -w /tmp/dontcare.pcap -G 1 -Z root

This seems trivial, but that the kind of stuff which are really easy to miss. Even if these days, security layers like apparmor mitigate this risk (causing a few headaches along the way), it's still relatively easy to mess it up.

And here I thought this is a curated list so AI can learn how to bypass sandboxes.

The first thing. Invoked processes inherit the permissions of the user who invoked them (unless they have the setuid bit). It's just in case you land access to a computer which has all the standard Unix tools disabled to stop attackers from lateral movement.

This is saying that restricting privileges by blacklisting commands do not work (and never worked).

It's the former. Not bypassing permissions but in shells that might be highly restricted to just a couple commands. Like others have said, very very common in CTFs.

Wouldn't a tar pipe be even lighter?

If there's a file your user does not have read access to, but you have the ability to run the `base64` binary as root, you can run `base64` as root, (thus encoding the file contents as base64), then pipe the output to another base64 process to decode the file contents.

So yes, the end result is just `cat` with extra steps.

I think the idea is that if you're given an improperly configured restricted shell/command access, you can use any of the listed tools to gain access to some subset of what that user would normally have access to in an unrestricted environment.

A very simple version of this would be if you set a user's default shell to "rbash" but the user can just run "bash" to get a real shell.

Maybe sudoers is configured to allow you to run base64 as root. Why would someone do this? No idea. But if you are in such a situation, now you know how to bypass the intended permissions and read any file on the system.

Or maybe you give Claude Code permission to run `base64` without review without realizing this lets it read any file, including maybe your secrets in .env or something.

...or something that runs CGI commands. Bash scripts are like the glue of the internet, and many of them are poorly-written. Tons of stuff still runs on PHP or relies on little Python cron jobs behind the scenes. A lot of the way this stuff works depends on being able to chain vulns together...an unescaped query to a database that gets piped to a nightly cron job to sync or backup something becomes an attack vector.

But that sort of access is only a social engineer away. People still click on stuff in emails, or run commands because a computer says so.

You might have WiFi access to mtr, allowing you to traceroute as root but not launch a shell or read files. But with these tools you can escalate.

Like it says in the preamble on the site, don't think of this as a collection of exploits, but rather as a compendium of knowledge about escalation techniques for use in emergencies.

I can't tell you how many times I burned my fingers as a young Unix developer in the 80's by untar'ing things wrongly, or fat-fingering an 'rm -rf /' and thus having a running system that will be catastrophic if I don't fix it before reboot, shell still active and .. what do? Consult this list of great advice and use it to rebuild the system and/or do things that need to be done that otherwise wouldn't be possible ..

GTFOBins is not just for hacking. Its also for system repair and recovery. I'd be as likely to consult this knowledge base after a hacker attack as before, if not more ..

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Not just shell access, but the server would need to be configured to also enable your user to run any of these binaries as root (such as an administrator putting them in the sudoers file).

So they're a pretty niche attack vector, and oftentimes crop up as a result of lazy/incompetent sysadmins.

You need initial access. This is just a list of tools you can use if you can't spawn a standard interactive shell, for whatever reason.

It doesn't make it easier to "hack" servers, it's just a list of things that you could use once you're already inside.

I think docker was used for these things before. I remember some big service had secrets in env vars and a shell access inside the docker image from a npm post install script let them evacuate these secrets

It's only relevant as a privilege escalation vector when you're able to execute those programs as root, but don't otherwise have root access on the server.

It's a pretty niche circumstance. Unless an admin allows users on a server to execute some of these random types of binaries as root, it's not going to be a concern. And, if it wasn't already obvious, distros are almost never configured this way OOTB

Because you have to have shell access to the server to use any of these.

In certain circumstances, they might be :-)

But you can't "hack a server" using just these techniques: they would be a (small) part of a chain of exploits.

You learn the most random ways to abuse program features, one I still remember because of how long it took to figure it out was an htb box that (after a long exploitation path) used NTFS ADS to hide the flag within the alternate stream in a decoy file; and of course the normal way to extract the stream was disabled so had to do some black magic with other binaries to get it

I don't think I've used any of these in a CTF tbh

Huh? How does that work exactly? I've heard of /proc fuckery before but didn't know you could disable aslr with it.