Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!rutgers!orstcs!mist!hakanson
From: hakanson@mist.cs.orst.edu (Marion Hakanson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Mounting floppies
Message-ID: <7819@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU>
Date: 9 Dec 88 19:36:05 GMT
References: <129@minya.UUCP> <8800002@gistdev> <7606@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU> <841@levels.sait.edu.au>
Sender: usenet@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU
Reply-To: hakanson@mist.CS.ORST.EDU (Marion Hakanson)
Organization: Oregon State University - CS - Corvallis, Oregon
Lines: 19

In article <841@levels.sait.edu.au> ccdn@levels.sait.edu.au (DAVID NEWALL) writes:
. . .
>> ** The main thing mountpub does is to check the contents of
>> ** the filesystem being mounted to be sure that there are no
>> ** setuid/setgid files that would give permissions that the
>
>Gee, I don't know.  I wonder what would happen if the user "mountpub"ed
>a floppy, and then replaced it with another disk that had setuid root
>shells on it -- ie, without unmounting the old disk?  Could be nasty...

That's a hardware problem (1/2 :-).  Doing such a thing would probably
be as likely to crash the system as to allow unauthorized access, but
that's a security problem as well.  Mountpub also neglects to check
for special (device) files, which I hadn't considered three years
ago when I wrote the program.

-- 
Marion Hakanson         Domain: hakanson@cs.orst.edu
                        UUCP  : {hp-pcd,tektronix}!orstcs!hakanson