The maintainers of the FreeBSD operating system released updates to address a critical flaw, tracked as CVE-2022-23093, in the ping module that could be potentially exploited to gain remote code execution.
The ping utility allows testing the reachability of a remote host using ICMP messages, it requires elevated privileges to use raw sockets. It is available to unprivileged users with the installation of a setuid bit set. This means that when ping runs, it creates the raw socket, and then revokes its elevated privileges.
A remote attacker can trigger the vulnerability, causing the ping program to crash and potentially leading to remote code execution in ping.
“The ping process runs in a capability mode sandbox on all affected versions of FreeBSD and is thus very constrainted in how it can interact with the rest of the system at the point where the bug can occur.” continues the advisory.
Researchers are recommended to upgrade vulnerable systems to a supported FreeBSD stable or release / security branch (releng) dated after the correction date.
