lkml.org 
[lkml]   [1998]   [Aug]   [6]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
From
SubjectRe: [PATCH] [SECURITY] suid procs exec'd with bad 0,1,2 fds
Date
On Thu, 06 Aug 1998, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
>It's not the kernel's job to protect broken applications against theirselves.

It's not the application that's compromised. It's the system. And the means by
which it is compromised is the broken application. It's (usually) nonsense to
protect an application against itself. (but you are right, it's absolutely not
the kernel's job to protect broken applications against themselves).

>By definition setuid root programs have much more power than normal programs,

Exactly the reason why the kernel should take all possible measures to prevent
abuse of such programs.

>and it's up to the author of that program to make it behave well.

Of course. It's in the human nature to make mistakes though. Trusting that
people won't make mistakes is foolish to say the least. Among other things,
security is about arranging things in such a manner that you minimize the
amount of trust that you have to put into third parties, and about minimizing
the amount of damage that can be done if you are forced to trust.

Andrej

--
Andrej Presern, andrejp@luz.fe.uni-lj.si

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.altern.org/andrebalsa/doc/lkml-faq.html

\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2005-03-22 13:43    [W:0.085 / U:0.656 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site