Re: [Sheflug] Sheflug Meeting / AccessSpace NIS

[Richard Lowe <nospam [at] btinternet.com>]

* home@alexhudson.com (home [at] alexhudson.com) wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 02, 2001 at 12:47:23PM +0100, Will Newton wrote:
> > > > The two vulnerabilities I refer to (The DEADJOE problem and reading .joerc
> > > > from cwd) are not so much things to be fixed, as things it makes no sense
> > > > to do in the first place.
> > >
> > > Reading .joerc from pwd is a good thing under a great many circumstances -
> > > for instance, if you want to enforce certain code style rules for a project,
> > > you can put a .joerc for that directory.
> > 
> > Theoretically yes. In practice no. It may be convenient now but next time
> > you edit a file as root it may not be so convenient.
> > And the DEADJOE problem is basically a temp file attack (in essence).
> 
> But both attacks are local attacks - they only count if you have a machine
> with untrusted users. And even then, only in limited circumstances (it's
> harder than a temp file attack, in the case of DEADJOE). Not something
> that's going to keep me awake at night..
>

Local attacks are still very bad.
But I dont remember anything about either bug, so I dont know anymore.
but assuming they dont lead to a user gaining extra privelidges, they
arent that bad, but still something to be wary of.

I dont use joe though, and I cant think off hand of a time I'd need to.

If you're happy risking whatever these vulnerabilities may lead to, fine.
but it is a concern.

Someone mentioned having . in your $PATH, which is something I'd never
do. but I can see it has a use, a lot of this stuff depends on the
situation you are in, but its important to see that there could be
problems in some, commonly occuring environments, therefore they are
bugs, and should be fixed.

> . I seem to also recall you were the one giving people heat for criticising
> Redhat's ridiculous release of 7.0, the Linux distro which gave us the
> Ramen worm, the Lion worm and two weeks' uptime... I don't remember you
> calling them 'schoolboys' :)
> 

Lion exploits a BIND bug, not RH specific at all from what I've read
(may be wrong tho).
Ramen exploited bugs in rpc.statd, LPRng, and... something I cant
remember. may have been RH specific tho.

The point being (apart from the stupid fd leak) non of them were really
Redhats fault (IIRC), you can blame them for starting a stupid number of
services my default, but it seems most distributions do that.

-- 
|*-------------------=[ Richard Lowe ]=------------------*|
| richlowe [at] btinternet.com                   UIN: 74724348 |           
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