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Date:      Thu, 3 Dec 1998 12:55:19 -0800 (PST)
From:      dima@best.net (Dima Ruban)
To:        robert+freebsd@cyrus.watson.org
Cc:        woodford@cc181716-a.hwrd1.md.home.com, security@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: mail.local
Message-ID:  <199812032055.MAA07083@burka.rdy.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.981203123334.12137A-100000@fledge.watson.org> from Robert Watson at "Dec 3, 1998 12:36:36 pm"

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Robert Watson writes:
> On Thu, 3 Dec 1998, Bill Woodford wrote:
> 
> > | Could somebody remind me of outcome of removing suid bit from mail.local
> > | discussion?
> > 
> > Hmmm, if you remove it, I believe local mail delivery will cease due to
> > permission problems.
> 
> That is my memory of the conclusions, at least when sendmail is not
> executing mail.local.  If sendmail is executing it (and sendmail is
> running as root) then I think it does behave correctly, at least when
> sendmail is running as a daemon.  I'm not sure if it behaves correctly
> when sendmail is running setuid from a normal user account as invoked by,
> say, pine.  My feeling is more and more that we should be using protocols

Yeah, it works allright. We've had this change for about 3-4 month (I think)
here and there's no problems.

> such as IMAP for mail access rather than try to fit everything into the
> context of file system permissions, as that requires us to come up with
> warped program behavior  (such as making more things setuid than actually
> need to be :).  It might be interesting to rewrite an imap daemon to use
> UNIX daemon sockets and ephemeral credential information to authenticate
> the user, and similarly have a local SMTP-style domain socket also using
> ephemeral data for authentication.  BSD (and other Unices also) provide us
> with a lot of tools to make life easier than we actually take advantage of
> :).

Well, it's a totally different discussion. Let's concentrate on a problems
one at a time :-)

> 
>   Robert N Watson 
> 
> robert@fledge.watson.org              http://www.watson.org/~robert/
> PGP key fingerprint: 03 01 DD 8E 15 67 48 73  25 6D 10 FC EC 68 C1 1C
> 
> Carnegie Mellon University            http://www.cmu.edu/
> TIS Labs at Network Associates, Inc.  http://www.tis.com/
> SafePort Network Services             http://www.safeport.com/
> 
> 
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-- dima

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