Shellshock Attack Flashcards

Flashcards covering key concepts and terms related to the Shellshock vulnerability.

Shellshock Attack

A severe vulnerability found in the bash shell program in 2014 that allowed attackers to run arbitrary commands on webservers.

Bash Shell

A command-line interpreter in operating systems that provides an interface between the user and the operating system; the shell containing the Shellshock vulnerability.

Shell Functions

Functions defined inside the shell, involved in the Shellshock vulnerability.

Export (in Shell context)

A command used to mark a shell variable, causing it to be passed down as an environment variable to child processes.

Child Process (in Shell context)

A process created by a parent process; in the context of Shellshock, it can inherit function definitions from the parent.

Environment Variable (in Shell context)

A variable that can be passed from a parent process to a child process; used to pass function definitions in Shellshock.

CVE-2014-6271

The assigned identifier for the Shellshock vulnerability publicly released on September 24, 2014.

parseandexecute()

A function in the bash source code that parses and executes shell commands, which, due to a bug, leads to the Shellshock vulnerability.

Set-UID Program

A program that runs with the privileges of the owner, regardless of who is running it; Shellshock can exploit these programs to execute unauthorized commands.

Common Gateway Interface (CGI)

A protocol used by web servers to run executable programs (often shell scripts) that dynamically generate web pages; vulnerable to Shellshock if bash is used.

Reverse Shell

A technique where the standard input, output, and error devices are redirected to a network connection, allowing attackers to control a shell on a remote machine.

netcat (nc)

A command-line utility used to establish network connections; used in Shellshock attacks to create a reverse shell.