From owner-freebsd-arch Fri Dec 14 4:44:28 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from whale.sunbay.crimea.ua (whale.sunbay.crimea.ua [212.110.138.65]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 226BF37B416; Fri, 14 Dec 2001 04:44:10 -0800 (PST) Received: (from ru@localhost) by whale.sunbay.crimea.ua (8.11.6/8.11.2) id fBEChqA72499; Fri, 14 Dec 2001 14:43:52 +0200 (EET) (envelope-from ru) Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 14:43:52 +0200 From: Ruslan Ermilov To: Robert Watson Cc: Greg Lehey , Garance A Drosihn , Peter Wemm , Nik Clayton , Warner Losh , ache@FreeBSD.org, freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Changing 'man' to check alternate destination for 'cat' pages Message-ID: <20011214144352.A71966@sunbay.com> References: <20011214101857.C35094@sunbay.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.23i Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Fri, Dec 14, 2001 at 05:27:49AM -0500, Robert Watson wrote: > > On Fri, 14 Dec 2001, Ruslan Ermilov wrote: > > > Just having a CATMAN envariable is not enough, this would break many > > things. There are hosts on which people use different locales > > simultaneously. Look at how the usr/share/man/en.ISO8859-1 is organized > > nowadays, and realize why, while sharing the man? directories with the > > .., it has its own cat? directories. > > Not to mention the security issues -- the one nice thing about the > hard-coded catman right now is that it greatly limits the scope for damage > from a setuid man. I'm not entirely opposed to the notion of configuring > its location in /etc/man.conf or something, but agree that a run-time > user-tunable version of the same would be worrying. Even leaving aside > the more serious attacks, imagine for a moment what would happen if > arbitrary users could tweak the contents of arbitrary .8 man pages :-). > > > The "cat" feature of man(1) is insecure, and is probably going to be > > nuked after a release of 4.5. > > Great! I've been hoping for that for years. :-) > Can I take it as an approval from core@ or security-officer@ team, both of which you are a member of? :-) Cheers, -- Ruslan Ermilov Oracle Developer/DBA, ru@sunbay.com Sunbay Software AG, ru@FreeBSD.org FreeBSD committer, +380.652.512.251 Simferopol, Ukraine http://www.FreeBSD.org The Power To Serve http://www.oracle.com Enabling The Information Age To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message