Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Thu, 19 Dec 1996 14:17:57 -0500 | From | "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <> | Subject | Re: Allowing users to set set[ug]id bits |
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From: marekm@i17linuxb.ists.pwr.wroc.pl (Marek Michalkiewicz) Date: Wed, 18 Dec 1996 19:10:51 +0100 (MET)
BTW, the idea is not mine - SCO UNIX supports something like this, so I thought it would be good to have that in Linux too (SCO sucks when it comes to performance, but they have some nice security features; I think we can have both performance and security). Quoting from the SCO man page:
setpriv(S)
This is part of the POSIX.6 security specification, which is something *additional* that you can layer on top of Linux. Note that it doesn't turn completely destroy the ability to make setuid programs, but it allows the system administrator to restrict (and many other things) on a very fine-grained basis.
POSIX.6 is a good thing, but it's not trivial to administer such a system securely. There is a mailing list for people who are interested in implementing POSIX.6 in Linux --- send mail to linux-privs-request@mit.edu if you wish to join. However, beware that it is a very big project to implement, and even if you do implement it, the number of people who will know how to administer such a system are very few. (Basically, you end up with a POSIX compliant system, but the security semantics are much more like VMS than Unix.)
- Ted
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