From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Apr 20 15: 1:28 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mail5.nc.rr.com (fe5.southeast.rr.com [24.93.67.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E887137B41C for ; Sat, 20 Apr 2002 15:01:22 -0700 (PDT) Received: from i8k.babbleon.org ([66.57.86.84]) by mail5.nc.rr.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.5.1877.687.68); Sat, 20 Apr 2002 17:59:49 -0400 Received: by i8k.babbleon.org (Postfix, from userid 111) id 52D82BB29; Sat, 20 Apr 2002 17:59:41 -0400 (EDT) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" From: Brian T.Schellenberger To: Paul Everlund Subject: Re: cat: A bug or just as it should be? Date: Sat, 20 Apr 2002 17:59:41 -0400 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.3] References: <3CC08E8E.B5EEEA90@cs.umu.se> <20020420034724.4FA12BB39@i8k.babbleon.org> <3CC136ED.28E55794@cs.umu.se> In-Reply-To: <3CC136ED.28E55794@cs.umu.se> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Message-Id: <20020420215941.52D82BB29@i8k.babbleon.org> Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Saturday 20 April 2002 05:37 am, you wrote: | Anyway, due to security reasons, I believe that removed directories and | files should be zeroed out, and hence not viewable by 'cat *', but doing | that maybe have some disadvantages that I do not know Really, they aren't zeroed for reasons of efficiency. I'm not sure what security hole would be plugged by erasing the *name* of the old file, but the contents are not, in general, erased either. I mean it's likely that they will get reused "soon" but there's no guarantee of that sort of thing. If security is a serious concern, you should install cfs or something of that ilk. That's what I do. The base file system is not meant to provide any security against somebody who has permissions. Since anybody can (with default security settings) boot in single-user mode without a password and function as root, that means that there's no security against anybody with knowledge and physical access to the system. If need security of that sort, then cfs provides it. (At some cost in convenience.) With cfs, even root can't get to your files. (This can be a pain sometimes, but it's good security.) -- Brian T. Schellenberger . . . . . . . bts@wnt.sas.com (work) Brian, the man from Babble-On . . . . bts@babbleon.org (personal) http://www.babbleon.org http://www.eff.org http://www.programming-freedom.org If you smell the smoke you don't need to be told what you've got to do; Yet there's a certain breed, so very in-between, they'd rather take a vote. -- DEVO -- Here To Go To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message