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Date:      Fri, 04 Jun 2004 23:57:51 +0100
From:      Colin Percival <colin.percival@wadham.ox.ac.uk>
To:        "Crist J. Clark" <cjc@freebsd.org>
Cc:        freebsd-security@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: syslogd(8) Dropping Privs
Message-ID:  <6.1.0.6.1.20040604235214.03fec120@popserver.sfu.ca>
In-Reply-To: <20040604195338.GA50275@blossom.cjclark.org>
References:  <20040604195338.GA50275@blossom.cjclark.org>

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At 20:53 04/06/2004, Crist J. Clark wrote:
>We haven't had many syslogd(8) vulnerabilities lately, but one
>less daemon running as root seems like a Good Thing. I do not
>see any drawbacks from a security point of view. The log files
>would have to be owned, or otherwise writeable, by this other
>user, but so what. Obviously, I may be missing something.

  One consideration is that if syslogd is not running as root,
it will no longer be able to write to a filesystem which is
already "full".
  On systems where non-root users can write to the filesystem
containing /var/log (and are not limited by quotas) this would
allow non-root users to disable logging, which would probably
be a Bad Thing.

Colin Percival




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