*BSD News Article 94497


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From: deraadt@theos.com (Theo de Raadt)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.bsd.misc,comp.security.unix
Subject: Re: *BSD* Security WWW/Mailing List?
Date: 26 Apr 1997 19:12:01 GMT
Organization: Pacifier BBS, Vancouver, Wa.  ((360) 693-0325)
Lines: 17
Message-ID: <DERAADT.97Apr26131201@zeus.pacifier.com>
References: <3356E1CC.299E@softway.com.au> <slrn5ltb2l.br4.tqbf@char-star.rdist.org>
	<5jo5m4$f9v@web.nmti.com> <slrn5m0dbf.jsb.tqbf@char-star.rdist.org>
	<5jqtkh$mmo@web.nmti.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: zeus.theos.com
In-reply-to: peter@nmti.com's message of 25 Apr 1997 18:37:05 GMT
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:6765 comp.unix.bsd.misc:3097 comp.security.unix:34053


In article <5jqtkh$mmo@web.nmti.com> peter@nmti.com (Peter da Silva) writes:

   That's useful, but not good enough. It doesn't protect programs called from
   a daemon, for example, as in the well known telnetd/login hole, or crontab
   type attacks, or stuff called from a webserver, ...

Any security-conscious program which is going to start a sub-process
is required to do a cleanup on it's child's capabilities (environment,
uids, gids, grouplist, open files, etc).

If it doesn't do that, well, that's the problem.  Roughly said,
anytime you move to/from higher priviledge you have some cleanup to
do.  If you don't, you are a sloppy programmer.
--
This space not left unintentionally unblank.		deraadt@openbsd.org
www.OpenBSD.org -- We're fixing security problems so you can sleep at night.
(If it wasn't so fascinating I might get some sleep myself...)