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From: obrien@cs.ucdavis.edu (David E. O'Brien)
Message-Id: <9601260937.AA00228@toadflax.cs.ucdavis.edu>
Subject: Re: Ownership of files/tcp_wrappers port
To: security@freebsd.org
Date: Fri, 26 Jan 1996 01:37:32 -0800 (PST)
In-Reply-To: <199601250134.AA23162@gateway.fedex.com> from "William McVey" at Jan 24, 96 07:36:57 pm
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> If you're paranoid, your NFS mounts are nosuid.  I'd say bin was of
> comparable secureness to root.  Root is, however, more likely to be stupid
> and use their password in cleartext over the 'net or be shoulder-snooped.

Nope, I've used the NFS mount someone's disk on my machine where I have
root, several times to fix problems when the other "sysadmins" didn't
maintain their boxes very well.  Much easier than trying to explain to
them how to fix things.

I did this with OUT sniffing or shoulder-snooping.  In fact NFS'ing and
su bin'ing is _SO_ much easier.  Exporting read-only would help reduce
this ability, but if I remember correctly, there is a bug/hole where you
can still trick out NFS to write to such an exported disk.

As demonistrated by Nathan Lawson <nlawson@statler.csc.calpoly.edu>,
having system binaries owned by ``bin'' has serious security flaws that
would be reduced by having them owned by ``root'', the *real* question is
how do we go about _offically_ changing this?

Petition JKH?  Find a sympathic ear on the Core team?

-- David    (obrien@cs.ucdavis.edu)