Hi,
On Sun, Mar 06, 2005 at 01:14:06PM +0000, Steve Kemp wrote:
> I can't think of any, because as you say you'd need to trick root
> into running it with a bogus HOME variable.
Hm, one possibility which comes to my mind now is things like code
from the International Obfuscated C Code Contest (http://www.ioccc.org/)
or obfuscated Perl (e.g. http://perl.plover.com/obfuscated/).
I guess some people might want to find out what such code does and just
cut'n'paste it and run it, possibly as root. Such code could easily do
any damage if run as root. On the other hand, an attacker wouldn't
fiddle with root's HOME in such a case, but do some 'rm -rf /' or
something similar _directly_, I guess.
Also, anyone running unknown code as root, probably deserves the result ;-)
> Having a program require root privileges to bind a port doesn't
> make it more likely to be updated - if as you say it's not setuid to
> start with.
>
> In fact they are probably safer than normal processes as they are
> typically binding a port to be a daemon - so they will be started
> by /etc/init.d/foo and that means the command line is effectively
> hardwired.
Yes, most of them. There are exceptions, though, things like ethereal,
mtr, etherape etc. which need to set the network device into promiscuous
mode etc.
Uwe.
-- Uwe Hermann <uwe_at_hermann-uwe.de> http://www.hermann-uwe.de | http://www.crazy-hacks.org http://www.it-services-uh.de | http://www.phpmeat.org http://www.unmaintained-free-software.org | http://www.holsham-traders.deReceived on Thu Mar 10 2005 - 12:05:28 GMT