captest(8) — Linux manual page

CAPTEST:(8)          System Administration Utilities         CAPTEST:(8)

NAME

       captest - a program to demonstrate capabilities

SYNOPSIS

       captest [ --ambient --drop-all | --drop-caps | --id ] [ --init-
       grp ] [ --lock ] [ --text ]

DESCRIPTION

       captest is a program that demonstrates and prints out the current
       process capabilities. Each option prints the same report. It will
       output current capabilities. then it will try to access
       /etc/shadow directly to show if that can be done. Then it creates
       a child process that attempts to read /etc/shadow and outputs the
       results of that. Then it outputs the capabilities that a child
       process would have.

       You can also apply file system capabilities to this program to
       study how they work. For example, filecap /usr/bin/captest chown.
       Then run captest as a normal user. Another interesting test is to
       make captest suid root so that you can see what the interaction
       is between root's credentials and capabilities. For example,
       chmod 4755 /usr/bin/captest. When run as a normal user, the
       program will see if privilege escalation is possible. But do not
       leave this app setuid root after you are don testing so that an
       attacker cannot take advantage of it.

OPTIONS

       --ambient
              This attempts to add CAP_CHOWN ambient capability.

       --drop-all
              This drops all capabilities including ambient and clears
              the bounding set.

       --drop-caps
              This drops just traditional capabilities.

       --id   This changes to uid and gid 99, drops supplemental groups,
              and clears the bounding set.

       --init-grp
              This changes to uid and gid 99 and then adds any
              supplemental groups that comes with that account. You
              would have add them prior to testing because by default
              there are no supplemental groups on account 99.

       --text This option outputs the effective capabilities in text
              rather than numerically.

       --lock This prevents the ability for child processes to regain
              privileges if the uid is 0.

SEE ALSO

       filecap(8), capabilities(7)

AUTHOR

       Steve Grubb

COLOPHON

       This page is part of the libcap-ng (capabilities commands and
       library (NG)) project.  Information about the project can be
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       not known how to report bugs for this man page; if you know,
       please send a mail to man-pages@man7.org.  This page was obtained
       from the tarball libcap-ng-0.8.5.tar.gz fetched from
       ⟨https://people.redhat.com/sgrubb/libcap-ng/index.html⟩ on
       2024-06-14.  If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML
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       man-pages@man7.org

Red Hat                         Sept 2020                    CAPTEST:(8)

Pages that refer to this page: capabilities(7)

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