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Date:      Tue, 7 Jan 1997 22:31:17 -0500 (EST)
From:      Matt Braithwaite <m-braithwaite@sjca.edu>
To:        freebsd-security@freebsd.org
Subject:   Obvious fix for tempfile race conditions?
Message-ID:  <199701080331.WAA02781@continuity.sjca.edu>

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This seems pretty obvious to me, so maybe I have something wrong, but:

As I understand it, there is a class of security holes that derives
from the ability of a random user to create a symlink in /tmp to some
file, such that a root or SUID root program will follow the link and
either damage or in some cases alter the file to produce a security
hole.

If I've got that much of it right, why not simply add a mount option
to disable symlinks on a given filesystem?  (Not saying the
implementation is simple, just the idea. :-) ) /tmp is normally its
own filesystem, so this doesn't seem to have any major disadvantages.
And it doesn't require all those programs out there that do sloppy
things with temp files to be rewritten.  Of course there might be
programs that depend on the ability to make symlinks in /tmp, but I've
sure never seen any.  Maybe for these programs there could be
something like HTTPd's SymLinksIfOwnerMatch option...

Any comments?

- -- 
Matt Braithwaite #!/bin/perl -s-- -export-a-crypto-system-sig -RSA-3-lines-PERL
http://          $m=unpack(H.$w,$m."\0"x$w),$_=`echo "16do$w 2+4Oi0$d*-^1[d2%Sa
www.sjca.edu/    2/d0<X+d*La1=z\U$n%0]SX$k"[$m*]\EszlXx++p|dc`,s/^.|\W//g,print
ph/m-braithwaite pack('H*',$_)while read(STDIN,$m,($w=2*$d-1+length$n&~1)/2)

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