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Date:      Wed, 14 May 1997 11:19:26 +0200
From:      j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
To:        current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: RELENG_2_2
Message-ID:  <19970514111926.DF34579@uriah.heep.sax.de>
In-Reply-To: <7493.863510486@time.cdrom.com>; from Jordan K. Hubbard on May 13, 1997 01:01:26 -0700
References:  <19970513071838.JT48650@uriah.heep.sax.de> <7493.863510486@time.cdrom.com>

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As Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:

> But I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me how making dtmail
> and/or some of the other mail agents suid root is any *less* of a
> security hole and all exchanges to date have, rather frustratingly,
> gone something like this:

Thomas admitted that dtmail is unintelligible.  This alone precludes
it from becoming set<any>id.

>   "Look, dtmail is the *only thing* which will even use this friggin' mail
>    group right now and so making it group writable by mail is hardly the
>    enormous security hole that everyone makes it out to be.  You'd prefer
>    dtmail to be suid root??  What about things like popper?

popper is _way_ smaller, basically intelligible, does not provide the
usual dangerous interfaces of MUAs (like spawning shells etc.).  I can
live with 10 poppers being setuid root, if this saves me from an MUA
being set[ug]id at all.

>   However, by doing this we're going to create a fork
> since I *must* to have this problem solved for the FreeBSD Desktop/Pro
> release and if there has to be something divergent in that version of
> FreeBSD then diverge it will.  I'm not willing to have dtmail broken
> in this release and Thomas Roell cannot fix this "correctly" in the
> time-span available to him, ...

Did he ever try to hire someone to fix this particular problem?

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)



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