The Single RAN baseband OAM service is intended to run as an unprivileged service. However, it initially starts with root privileges and assigns certain capabilities before dropping to an unprivileged level. The capabilities retained from the root period are considered extensive after the privilege drop and, in theory, could potentially allow actions beyond the intended scope of the OAM service. These actions could include gaining root privileges, accessing root-owned files, modifying them as the file owner, and then returning them to root ownership. This issue has been corrected starting from release 24R1-SR 0.2 MP and later.
Beginning with release 24R1-SR 0.2 MP, the OAM service software capabilities are restricted to the minimum necessary.
The product performs an operation at a privilege level that is higher than the minimum level required, which creates new weaknesses or amplifies the consequences of other weaknesses.
New weaknesses can be exposed because running with extra privileges, such as root or Administrator, can disable the normal security checks being performed by the operating system or surrounding environment. Other pre-existing weaknesses can turn into security vulnerabilities if they occur while operating at raised privileges. Privilege management functions can behave in some less-than-obvious ways, and they have different quirks on different platforms. These inconsistencies are particularly pronounced if you are transitioning from one non-root user to another. Signal handlers and spawned processes run at the privilege of the owning process, so if a process is running as root when a signal fires or a sub-process is executed, the signal handler or sub-process will operate with root privileges.