Fixing bash Shellshock vulnerability on Raspberry Pi

The recent bash vulnerability, a.k.a. “Shellshock”, is pretty bad, considering it might actually have been around for a very long time, maybe even dating back to the predecessor of bash. Not good.

So what about Raspberry Pi’s?
Are they vulnerable?

Turns out they are, but there is already a fix available for them and patching a Raspi is very simple. Whether your actual Raspi is vulnerable depends on what distribution you are using, and how recently you upgraded the software in it.
The Raspi used below is running IPE-R1, which is a blackout-proof version of Raspian.

First let’s find out what bash version we have:

root@raspi-2:~# dpkg -s bash | grep Version
Version: 4.2+dfsg-0.1
root@raspi-2:~#

You can also run this little script to determine whether your Raspi is vulnerable to Shellshock

root@raspi-2:~# env x='() { :;}; echo "WARNING: SHELLSHOCK DETECTED"' bash --norc -c ':' 2>/dev/null;
WARNING: SHELLSHOCK DETECTED
root@raspi-2:~#

Let’s fix this. Just refresh the repos and upgrade bash (the patched version is available in the main repos).

root@raspi-2:~# apt-get update && apt-get install --only-upgrade bash
Get:1 http://archive.raspberrypi.org wheezy Release.gpg [490 B]
Get:2 http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org wheezy Release.gpg [490 B]
Get:3 http://archive.raspberrypi.org wheezy Release [10.2 kB]
...
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Suggested packages:
 bash-doc
The following packages will be upgraded:
 bash
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 54 not upgraded.
Need to get 1,443 kB of archives.
After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/ wheezy/main bash armhf 4.2+dfsg-0.1+deb7u3 [1,443 kB]
Fetched 1,443 kB in 1s (1,386 kB/s)
(Reading database ... 29754 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace bash 4.2+dfsg-0.1 (using .../bash_4.2+dfsg-0.1+deb7u3_armhf.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement bash ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Setting up bash (4.2+dfsg-0.1+deb7u3) ...
update-alternatives: using /usr/share/man/man7/bash-builtins.7.gz to provide /usr/share/man/man7/builtins.7.gz (builtins.7.gz) in auto mode
root@raspi1:~#

The installed version of bash is now +deb7u3

root@raspi-2:~# dpkg -s bash | grep Version
Version: 4.2+dfsg-0.1+deb7u3
root@raspi-2:~#

The short test script above also returns nothing:

root@raspi-2:~# env x='() { :;}; echo "WARNING: SHELLSHOCK DETECTED"' bash --norc -c ':' 2>/dev/null;
root@raspi-2:~#

You could of course also just do an “apt-get upgrade” to upgrade all packages on your Raspi, would take a bit longer but will work just as well.
Also, if you are not logged in as root you need to do a “sudo apt-get update”, of course.