Fix su bruteforce false positives on BusyBox systems (bbsuid)#537
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carlospolop merged 1 commit intopeass-ng:masterfrom Jan 16, 2026
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Fix su bruteforce false positives on BusyBox systems (bbsuid)
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Sorry I didn't see this PR with all the other ones, merging! Thanks for taking the time to create the PR! |
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Hi team,

I encountered a false positive issue with the su bruteforce function (su_try_pwd) while testing on a machine running Alpine Linux with BusyBox's su implementation (bbsuid).
The Issue:
The current logic checks if [ "$trysu" ]; then. Since trysu captures stdout, and BusyBox's su outputs prompts (e.g., "Password:") and error messages to stdout instead of stderr when running non-interactively, the variable is never empty. This causes LinPEAS to report every password as valid.
Reproduction:
I verified this behavior on the target machine:
The Fix:
I verified on the target system that despite the stdout behavior, BusyBox correctly returns a non-zero exit code on failure and 0 on success.
I have updated linPEAS/builder/linpeas_parts/functions/su_try_pwd.sh to rely on the exit code ($?) instead of the stdout content:
I have tested this change locally on the affected machine, and it successfully eliminated the false positives while correctly identifying the valid password.
Thanks for the great tool!