on Wed, Aug 28, 2002 at 11:42:46AM +0100, Alexis Lee wrote:
Mine is a ppp-networked, totally-firewalled system that sits in my bedroom. Open is not the word.
client-side vulnerabilities. see recent problems in libpng. firewalls are not perfect. some data has to be permitted after all.
Aaargh! This destroys much of the point of user 'nobody'. 'Nobody' should have no privileges whatsoever.
No, it should have no blanket privileges. Allowing it to run a specified set of programs carries no hidden security risk at all.
programs have to be designed to run at privilege levels above that of the user invoking them, whether it is by a set-id bit or sudo. it is hard to do since the environment is often trusted far too much. there have been overflows in grep. but who cares? well, with sudo just permitting grep to be used, directly or via a script, this overflow becomes a root vulnerability.