Date: Thu, 3 Dec 1998 12:36:36 -0500 (EST) From: Robert Watson <robert@cyrus.watson.org> To: Bill Woodford <woodford@cc181716-a.hwrd1.md.home.com> Cc: ML FreeBSD Security <security@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: mail.local Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.981203123334.12137A-100000@fledge.watson.org> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.96.981203115141.7707B-100000@cc181716-a.hwrd1.md.home.com>
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On Thu, 3 Dec 1998, Bill Woodford wrote: > | Could somebody remind me of outcome of removing suid bit from mail.local > | discussion? > > Hmmm, if you remove it, I believe local mail delivery will cease due to > permission problems. That is my memory of the conclusions, at least when sendmail is not executing mail.local. If sendmail is executing it (and sendmail is running as root) then I think it does behave correctly, at least when sendmail is running as a daemon. I'm not sure if it behaves correctly when sendmail is running setuid from a normal user account as invoked by, say, pine. My feeling is more and more that we should be using protocols such as IMAP for mail access rather than try to fit everything into the context of file system permissions, as that requires us to come up with warped program behavior (such as making more things setuid than actually need to be :). It might be interesting to rewrite an imap daemon to use UNIX daemon sockets and ephemeral credential information to authenticate the user, and similarly have a local SMTP-style domain socket also using ephemeral data for authentication. BSD (and other Unices also) provide us with a lot of tools to make life easier than we actually take advantage of :). Robert N Watson robert@fledge.watson.org http://www.watson.org/~robert/ PGP key fingerprint: 03 01 DD 8E 15 67 48 73 25 6D 10 FC EC 68 C1 1C Carnegie Mellon University http://www.cmu.edu/ TIS Labs at Network Associates, Inc. http://www.tis.com/ SafePort Network Services http://www.safeport.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-security" in the body of the message
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