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Path: utzoo!attcan!lsuc!ecicrl!clewis
From: clewis@ecicrl.UUCP (Chris Lewis)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.sysadmin,comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Dangerous hole in Usenet!
Message-ID: <155@ecicrl.UUCP>
Date: 29 Nov 88 03:36:23 GMT
References: <1971@van-bc.UUCP> <572@comdesign.CDI.COM> <5517@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> <561@redsox.UUCP> <215@twwells.uucp>
Reply-To: clewis@ecicrl.UUCP (Chris Lewis)
Organization: Elegant Communications Inc. (CRL Division)
Lines: 34

In article <215@twwells.uucp> bill@twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells) writes:
>In article <561@redsox.UUCP> campbell@redsox.UUCP (Larry Campbell) writes:
>: What's all this about writing gobs of code to decipher some new shar format?
>: Why not just chroot(2) to a safe place before feeding the article to sh?
>
>Because you have to be superuser to chroot. I'm not about to have
>chroot(1) be setuid root, so that means writing a special setuid root
>program that just chroots so I can then unshar my mail maps.  And that
>means having One More setuid root program running around on my system.
>No thanks.

Let me get this straight - you're so afraid of setuid programs that
you won't even write your own 4 line C program to chroot and unpack your
maps.  I take it then that you don't unpack maps.  Right?  Because it'd
be silly to use unprotected unshars if you're afraid of chroots inside
programs you've written.

Has anybody got a version of uuhosts that is in postable state and
(at least vaguely) is up to date?  The stuff I've been running predates
the Great-Renaming.  It would be really nice if a newish version was
reposted.  Rich?

Secondly, can someone out there explain why chroot is privileged?  Or
why /etc/chroot isn't setuid?  It seems pretty darn silly that some
mechanism that can only be used for *reducing* access rights requires
root permission.  If only /etc/chroot allowed anybody to run it, and
it carefully made sure that there was a setuid(getuid()) etc before
invoking whatever it was going to invoke, the uuhosts unshar would
be trivial.
-- 
Chris Lewis, Markham, Ontario, Canada
{uunet!attcan,utgpu,yunexus,utzoo}!lsuc!ecicrl!clewis
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