Back Door found in Allwinner Kernels

[BuildTheRobots]

Don't have my board available to test, but does anyone know if this issue effects the Pine64 linux (and potentially android) images?

Article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/09/..._backdoor/

also comments on HackerNews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11672590


tldr: if `/proc/sunxi_debug/sunxi_debug` exists, try writing "rootmydevice" to it - the process that does gets root.

[tkaiser]

If people would start to click on the links in articles they link to then this FUD would've already stopped. 'Original' article linked to: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic...-h3a83th8/

Time between issue detected and confirmed that's a non issue for A64 BSP kernel by longsleep: 5 MINUTES http://irclog.whitequark.org/linux-sunxi...9#16314390 (look at the timestamps).

Time it took to start the usual Allwinner bashing using wrong claims all Allwinner devices would be affected: Over a week.

And BTW: It's not a backdoor, it's just a nice local privileges escalation 

[BuildTheRobots]

If people would start to click on the links in articles they link to then this FUD would've already stopped. 'Original' article linked to: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic...-h3a83th8/

Time between issue detected and confirmed that's a non issue for A64 BSP kernel by longsleep: 5 MINUTES http://irclog.whitequark.org/linux-sunxi...9#16314390 (look at the timestamps).

Time it took to start the usual Allwinner bashing using wrong claims all Allwinner devices would be affected: Over a week.

And BTW: It's not a backdoor, it's just a nice local privileges escalation 

Wasn't aware of the armbian site, though it's now bookmarked; thank you. Obviously wasn't aware of the irc logs though it's nice to be able to reference them; thank you agian.
Title was copy/pasted from the register article; deliberately not edited as I didn't want to be accused of prejudice.

tldr: nothing to see, no excitement, move along - which is probably the best outcome if slightly less exciting than I was hoping for

[nomadewolf]

This is very bad.
But it sheds some light on why Allwinner refuses to cooperate with open source...