Linux

Question 1

What is an environment attack?

Answer 1

Environment is a set of predefined variables that controls the behaviour of the shell. Attacker could manipulate environment, for example “path substitution attack” where attacker modifies PATH to point to a malicious program (which will be executed with privileges of application)

Question 2

What is a path traversal attack?

Answer 2

When attacker provides a manipulated file path as input that is not sanitised properly, allowing them to gain access to sensitive files.
e.g. using .. to traverse back directories

Question 3

What is a symlink attack?

Answer 3

When application interacts with files without checking the type and status of the files, so a symlink can be created to e.g. compare a file with itself and mistakenly authenticate attacker

Question 4

What is a command injection attack?

Answer 4

If the -exec option is used with the find command then attacker can execute any command they like.
Or if attacker uses special shell characters (e.g. ; for chaining commands) to execute commands