From owner-freebsd-chat Fri Sep 15 10:48:10 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from be-well.ilk.org (lowellg.ne.mediaone.net [24.147.184.128]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D24C937B422 for ; Fri, 15 Sep 2000 10:48:08 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from lowell@localhost) by be-well.ilk.org (8.11.0/8.11.0) id e8FHm2807625; Fri, 15 Sep 2000 13:48:02 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from lowell) To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Tripwire vs. Mtree References: <8pmlud$16jf$1@FreeBSD.csie.NCTU.edu.tw> From: Lowell Gilbert Date: 15 Sep 2000 13:48:02 -0400 In-Reply-To: jcwells@nwlink.com's message of "13 Sep 2000 09:40:29 +0800" Message-ID: <44og1p5yy5.fsf@lowellg.ne.mediaone.net> Lines: 16 X-Mailer: Gnus v5.7/Emacs 20.7 Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org jcwells@nwlink.com ("Jason C. Wells") writes: > It looks to me like mtree can do anything tripwire can do. Am I missing > something? Why use tripwire when we can use mtree? Remember, there's a chicken-and-egg problem: if your system is compromised, you can't trust its mtree executable to detect the fact. Even if you have a "safe" copy of the executable, you can't trust the system's standard libraries, because those may have been compromised too. If you had a statically linked version of mtree on the floppy where you keep the checksums, mtree would be roughly as good as tripwire, although not as convenient, and certainly the tripwire option to build a standalone floppy would take a bit of work to emulate. - Lowell To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message