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Date:      Fri, 19 Oct 2001 15:35:10 -0400
From:      Zvezdan Petkovic <zvezdan@CS.WM.EDU>
To:        security@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: KCheckPass -- make it setuid root or not?
Message-ID:  <20011019153510.A3031@corona.cs.wm.edu>
In-Reply-To: <20011019133826.O4565-100000@palanthas.neverending.org>; from ftobin@neverending.org on Fri, Oct 19, 2001 at 01:41:34PM -0400
References:  <20011019120706.T25747@squall.waterspout.com> <20011019133826.O4565-100000@palanthas.neverending.org>

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On Fri, Oct 19, 2001 at 01:41:34PM -0400, Frank Tobin wrote:
> Will Andrews, at 12:07 -0500 on 2001-10-19, wrote:
> 
>    OK, so I keep getting mail every now and then from people who can't
>    figure out why kcheckpass / kscreensaver won't authenticate their
>    password(s).  It's because I decided to play it safe and made
>    kcheckpass non setuid root, which it needs in order to call
>    getpwnam().
> 
> Why would you choose to make it non setuid root?  Isn't the warning that
> is associated with all setuid-installed programs enough?  Not installing
> it setuid-root would be like installing sudo without setuid; it's
> pointless without the bit set.
> 

Or a similar reasoning: Is it any safer to have xterm or rxvt run as
suid than kcheckpass?

-- 
Zvezdan Petkovic <zvezdan@cs.wm.edu>
http://www.cs.wm.edu/~zvezdan/

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