BASH Shellshock vulnerability and FIX

It allows the attacker to specify arbitrary commands to execute by changing an environment variable in a specific way. Bash is the default command interpreter for Linux and many other Unix versions and is consequently widespread use. But by itself the vulnerability is not that terrible, after all it is a local vulnerability and BASH is a command interpreter, its only reason to exist is to execute commands, so not such a big deal...

Unfortunately this is not quite true as we need to look at how Bash is used. True in its normal form as command interpreter the attack vectors are quite small. However Bash is very often involved in a networked setup to execute commands and that opens up an interesting attack vector. Imagine a webserver that allows you to ping an IP address (my router at home has that function for example), it will most likely just call the "ping" executable with the argument that you supplied, probably checking whether the argument is formatted correctly as an IP address.

RedHat has an extended list of situations that involve Bash in a remote context and you can see it has the potential be a widespread problem, similar to Heartbleed in April. Some of the security researchers involved at the time, namely @ErrataRob have already started their Internet wide scans looking for vulnerable servers:

• Apache server using mod_cgi or mod_cgid are affected if CGI scripts are either written in bash, or spawn subshells. Such subshells are implicitly used by system/popen in C, by os.system/os.popen in Python, system/exec in PHP (when run in CGI mode), and open/system in Perl if a shell is used (which depends on the command string)
• ForceCommand is used in sshd configs to provide limited command execution capabilities for remote users. This flaw can be used to bypass that and provide arbitrary command execution. Some Git and Subversion deployments use such restricted shells. Regular use of OpenSSH is not affected because users already have shell access.
• DHCP clients invoke shell scripts to configure the system, with values taken from a potentially malicious server. This would allow arbitrary commands to be run, typically as root, on the DHCP client machine.
• Various daemons and SUID/privileged programs may execute shell scripts with environment variable values set / influenced by the user, which would allow for arbitrary commands to be run.
• Any other application which is hooked onto a shell or runs a shell script as using bash as the interpreter. Shell scripts which do not export variables are not vulnerable to this issue, even if they process untrusted content and store it in (unexported) shell variables and open subshells.

To check the Vulnerability 

env x='() { :;}; echo vulnerable' bash -c 'echo hello'

If you get an out put like

==

Vulnerable

hello

==

The Bash is said to be Vulnerable 

If you get an output like 

====

bash: warning: x: ignoring function definition attempt

bash: error importing function definition for `x'

hello

====

The Bash is not Vulnerable.

Fixes,

 For redhat ,centos ,debian and ubuntu the patches are already available in the repos 

In redhat/Centos

yum update bash

In debian/Ubuntu 

apt-get update && apt-get install --only-update bash

Or else if you want to Compile and install the latest bash 

apt-get install wget patch gcc make

yum install wget patch gcc make 

mkdir src

cd src

wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bash/bash-4.3.tar.gz

#download all patches

for i in $(seq -f "%03g" 0 25); do wget     http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bash/bash-4.3-patches/bash43-$i; done

tar zxvf bash-4.3.tar.gz 

cd bash-4.3

#apply all patches

for i in $(seq -f "%03g" 0 25);do patch -p0 < ../bash43-$i; done

#build and install

./configure && make && make install

cd .. 

cd ..

rm -r src

Once patches are applied check the vulnerability again and make sure its fine.

More updates are been coming regarding this Will keep you updated. 

Workaround: Using mod_security:

The following mod_security rules can be used to reject HTTP requests containing data that may be interpreted by Bash as function definition if set in its environment. They can be used to block attacks against web services, such as attacks against CGI applications outlined above.

Request Header values:

SecRule REQUEST_HEADERS "^\(\) {" "phase:1,deny,id:1000000,t:urlDecode,status:400,log,msg:'CVE-2014-6271 - Bash Attack'"

SERVER_PROTOCOL values:

SecRule REQUEST_LINE "\(\) {" "phase:1,deny,id:1000001,status:400,log,msg:'CVE-2014-6271 - Bash Attack'"

GET/POST names:

SecRule ARGS_NAMES "^\(\) {" "phase:2,deny,id:1000002,t:urlDecode,t:urlDecodeUni,status:400,log,msg:'CVE-2014-6271 - Bash Attack'"

GET/POST values:

SecRule ARGS "^\(\) {" "phase:2,deny,id:1000003,t:urlDecode,t:urlDecodeUni,status:400,log,msg:'CVE-2014-6271 - Bash Attack'"

File names for uploads:

SecRule FILES_NAMES "^\(\) {" "phase:2,deny,id:1000004,t:urlDecode,t:urlDecodeUni,status:400,log,msg:'CVE-2014-6271 - Bash Attack'"

These may result in false positives but it's unlikely, and they can log them and keep an eye on it. You may also want to avoid logging as this could result in a significant amount of log files.

Workaround: Using IPTables:

A note on using IPTables string matching:

iptables using -m string --hex-string '|28 29 20 7B|'

Is not a good option because the attacker can easily send one or two characters per packet and avoid this signature easily. However, it may provide an overview of automated attempts at exploiting this vulnerability.