Circumventing oppressive admin

From MacShadows KB

Introduction

The idea of this article is quite simple: to get past any parental controls or other such methods of oppression.

Mac OS X Parental Controls

The Mac OS X parental controls are, with the exception of restricting the Finder, weak. the easiest option is to get an alternate program for each of the purposes that the OS X default serves.

Getting these apps with Safari restrictions on

It may be a problem if you have only Safari and you need to download these applications, yet they aren't in your bookmarks, but, you can get Camino from ftp without a browser. Cyberduck is also a good GUI to have, so if you suspect you may ever have a need to ftp something you can download it here: [1]. You can then select "new connection" and connect to the server ftp.mozilla.org and choose anonymous login. This should log you in and allow you to access files for download, choose pub/mozilla.org/Camino/releases and download the newest version of Camino by double clicking on it. you now have a non-restricted web browser to download these applications from.

Setuid Commands

And then there is the problem of not having enough permissions to execute specefic commands in Terminal. luck for us there's a way to run a command as root without even having admin. there is something called the setuid bit, which can be chmodded on. when the setuid bit is on, no matter who uses the command their user id is set to the owner of the file. this means that if you are underprivelaged and you use a command setuided to 0 (root) you can use that command as though you were root. to actually do this to a command, you should make a copy, put it into a bin of your own and then chmod it, (from SUM of course) let's pretend your username is Bob, and you're in SUM:

# mount -uaw
# type rm
rm is /bin/rm
# cp /bin/rm /Users/Bob/mybin/rmz
# chown root:wheel /Users/Bob/mybin/rmz
# chmod 4777 /Users/Bob/mybin/rmz
# reboot

now if you add the mybin to your PATH and use rmz instead of rm, you can delete..anything.

Recommended commands to setuid

rm
vi (not sure if it works)
nicl
bash (not sure if it works)
chmod
chown
kill

Screw it, just go crazy chowning and chmodding...have fun kiddies!