From owner-freebsd-security Fri Sep 29 21:24:12 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-security@freebsd.org Received: from green.dyndns.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 56DAF37B671; Fri, 29 Sep 2000 21:24:06 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (j7esry@localhost [127.0.0.1] (may be forged)) by green.dyndns.org (8.11.0/8.11.0) with ESMTP id e8U4O1533513; Sat, 30 Sep 2000 00:24:04 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from green@FreeBSD.org) Message-Id: <200009300424.e8U4O1533513@green.dyndns.org> X-Mailer: exmh version 2.2 06/23/2000 with nmh-1.0.4 To: Roman Shterenzon Cc: Kris Kennaway , security@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: cvs commit: ports/mail/pine4 Makefile (fwd) In-Reply-To: Message from Roman Shterenzon of "Sat, 30 Sep 2000 02:41:30 +0200." From: "Brian F. Feldman" Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 00:24:00 -0400 Sender: owner-freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org > Perhaps I'll move to mutt, the same command gives only 92 occurrences :) > Mutt on the other hand has sgid binary installed.. > > On Fri, 29 Sep 2000, Kris Kennaway wrote: > > > It almost killed me to see this: > > > > mollari# find pine4.21 -type f | xargs egrep '(sprintf|strcpy|strcat)' | wc -l > > 4299 > > > > Don't use pine - I don't believe it is practical to make it secure. :-( > > > > Kris Now we should do something else: Pine is pretty popular. It shouldn't be, so we should create a page showing other mailers that are known to be much more secure and their virtues. In a sense, propaganda :) but I feel it's very important to move people away from such insecure software, and they simply won't unless they see alternatives. So, how about it? Should we set up a page so we have a URL to put in the Pine insecurity notice that shows, "you can live without Pine"? I'd propose the first two most popular mailers (it seems) after Pine: mutt and exmh. For instance, I use exmh, so I am interested in nmh being secure. I checked the source, and I found only <100 uses of sprintf/strcat/strcpy. Only a few of them I decided could pose a threat (others MAYBE being exploitable from the configuration files, but that's no big deal at all ;), and even then, the user would have to create a really weird mail format file to do it. So, given those two as believed very secure (or three, counting nmh and exmh as an add-on which it really is) as a start, should we point people to the alternatives which are much safer? I volunteer to do most of the work on it... -- Brian Fundakowski Feldman \ FreeBSD: The Power to Serve! / green@FreeBSD.org `------------------------------' To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-security" in the body of the message