From owner-freebsd-stable Mon Aug 20 20:40:46 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mail2.uniserve.com (mail2.uniserve.com [204.244.156.10]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 07BAA37B407 for ; Mon, 20 Aug 2001 20:40:44 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from tom@uniserve.com) Received: from mail2.uniserve.com ([204.244.156.10]) by mail2.uniserve.com with esmtp (Exim 3.13 #1) id 15Z2P7-000E2a-00; Mon, 20 Aug 2001 20:40:37 -0700 Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2001 20:40:37 -0700 (PDT) From: Tom X-Sender: tom@athena.uniserve.ca To: Eugene Grosbein Cc: stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: stale entries in utmp (security issue?) In-Reply-To: <3B81D71B.B099197F@svzserv.kemerovo.su> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Tue, 21 Aug 2001, Eugene Grosbein wrote: > Hi! > > 1. login as root > 2. type 'login -f username' when username is valid name of user that is > not logged now > 3. type 'logout' > 4. Now you are root but command 'w' does not say so (security?) > 5. type 'logout' > 6. Now command 'w' says user 'username' is still logged but it has no > processes. Since the root user can just delete the utmp file, there is not too much to be done about this. Some UNIX systems have gone to a utmp API and an utmp server to maintain the logged in user state better. Tom To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message