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From: guido@gvr.win.tue.nl (Guido van Rooij)
Message-Id: <199610142059.WAA02649@gvr.win.tue.nl>
Subject: Re: bin/1805: Bug in ftpd
To: marcs@znep.com (Marc Slemko)
Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 22:59:19 +0200 (MET DST)
Cc: security-officer@freebsd.org, freebsd-security@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.95.961014121116.4318C-100000@alive.ampr.ab.ca> from Marc Slemko at "Oct 14, 96 12:14:55 pm"
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Marc Slemko wrote:
> A more permanent fix to the source may be something along the lines of the
> below patch (against RELENG_2_1_5_RELEASE), but there should be an
> official fix out in the next little bit:
> 

I'm not really happy with this fix as well, but it's better than nothing.,
The reason being that if ftp wants to dump core, it should dump core.
If you prohibit this you'll never be able to debug any problems after
somethuing went wrong. What should be done is make sure the buffers containing
the sensitive info are cleared as soon as the info has been used.
The same problem could show up with any other suid root program that reads
the password databases. (if that is indeed the happening. It might also be
that just the users password string is dumped only.)

I'll investigate things tomorrow evening.

-Guido