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Date:      Tue, 11 Aug 1998 20:45:13 -0400
From:      Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>
To:        mtaylor@cybernet.com, freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Possible security "risk" in ftp client
Message-ID:  <v0401170ab1f689b6389e@[128.113.24.47]>
In-Reply-To: <XFMail.980811163822.mtaylor@cybernet.com>

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At 4:38 PM -0400 8/11/98, Mark J. Taylor wrote:
> This is actually quite bad: any "ps -ax" will show the username
> and password.  Using setproctitle(3) would be an attempt to close
> this, but it would create a race condition.
>
> The program "/usr/bin/fetch" does it better: use the environment
> variables FTP_LOGIN and FTP_PASSWORD.

I guess you haven't tried 'ps -axeww' very often...

At the very least, it does sound like a good idea to have the
ftp client call setproctitle (or whatever) to reduce the
security exposure of the current behavior, but changing it to
use environment variables would be a step backwards...


---
Garance Alistair Drosehn           =   gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer          or  drosih@rpi.edu
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

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