A JOURNEY FROM SUDO IPTABLES TO LOCAL PRIVILEGE ESCALATION

Summary from the TLDR InfoSec newsletter

This blog post demonstrates how a low-privileged user on a Linux machine can gain root privileges by manipulating iptables and iptables-save through sudo, potentially leading to local privilege escalation. Leveraging sudo commands with NOPASSWD privileges or combining sudo with tools like tcpdump can allow for executing arbitrary commands as root. By exploiting the functionalities of iptables and iptables-save, an attacker can craft a root entry in /etc/passwd and escalate privileges to root on the system.