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FatGid: FreeBSD 14.x kernel local privilege escalation

49 points

by WhyNotHugo

4 hours ago

| past

| 3 comments

| fatgid.io

| HN

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turkeyboi

1 hour ago

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Why does this need to be a whole ass website

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tptacek

1 hour ago

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Why not? This weird complaint has been happening since ~2010 and it has never made any sense. You are strictly better off with the website than without it. When it was vulnerability researchers getting all peevish about the status competition they were running, I at least understood where the complaint was coming from, but even among practitioners, branded vulnerabilities are so much the norm at this point that there's no status implication anymore.

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cryo32

1 hour ago

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You're not going to get anywhere in the security sector unless you gain notoriety i.e. are noticed.

This appears to come from dressing up like Elton John in a feather suit and hiring a marketing team.

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tptacek

1 hour ago

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It's a wall of text about a kernel stack overflow. I'm not sure where the "Elton John" part is. Is it... that they used an accent color?

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dragontamer

1 hour ago

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What?

Is there something in this website that feels unnecessary? It seems like a good format of sharing high quality information.

This looks like a full bug into a complete root escalation of a kernel. That's hard to do and deserving of praise. The fact that we have a writeup organized like this is awesome.

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This is sort of the expert level stuff that I thought HackerNews would most enjoy.

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socphoenix

2 hours ago

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Not sure why this is saying it isn’t patched, they released the notice including fix for 14.4 yesterday?

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irishcoffee

1 hour ago

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Maybe they're not up to snuff on yesterday? They published this yesterday.

> The bug was silently fixed in the main branch on 2025-11-27 (commit 000d5b52c19ff3858a6f0cbb405d47713c4267a4) as a side effect of a broader function refactoring. The fix has not been backported to stable/14 or releng/14.4. FreeBSD 14.4-RELEASE remains vulnerable.

> FreeBSD 15.0 still carries the sizeof(*groups) typo and is therefore vulnerable, but the surrounding code differs enough from 14.4 that the chain primitives developed here do not lift the overflow into a working LPE on that branch. On 15.0 the bug remains a kernel panic triggered by any unprivileged user.

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djha-skin

1 hour ago

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TrueNAS is on FreeBSD, as well as lots of network equipment. This does affect us more than we think as operators.

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yjftsjthsd-h

36 minutes ago

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I would think that pure-storage NAS or network equipment was effectively completely immune to local privilege escalation. I'll give you the NAS where it might be running untrusted containers or such, but that's it.

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1over137

31 minutes ago

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Alas, TrueNAS actually switched to Linux a couple of years ago.

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sbankowi

16 minutes ago

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FreeBSD was the reason I chose TrueNAS Core. Unfortunately, you are right, TrueNAS Scale (Linux) is where they are focusing all their attention. At this point I will not purchase additional TrueNAS equipment as I feel I was "rug pulled." I get that they are going after more of the Docker container/app market, but I just want a solid ZFS w/excellent networking NAS device. Linux is close to this ideal, but it isn't as "Set and Forget" as FreeBSD (IMO).

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ActionHank

1 hour ago

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Possibly Playstation as well.

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sbankowi

14 minutes ago

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Also Netgate's devices running PFSense.