Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!sunic!liuida!prodix!isadora!hacker
From: hacker@isadora.ikp.liu.se (Goran Larsson [Hacker of Hackefors])
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Setuid smail2.5?
Keywords: smail setuid
Message-ID: <534@isadora.ikp.liu.se>
Date: 4 Dec 89 22:53:25 GMT
Sender: news@prodix.liu.se
Organization: Hackers Home, Hackefors, Linkoping, Sweden
Lines: 32

I have ben bothered about smail 2.5 for sometime now.  Smail runs as the
user that starts smail, typically this is uucp for incomming mail and
the user sending mail for outgoing mail.  This means that some files
requires read and/or write permission for everybody on the machine:

   /usr/lib/uucp/paths		rw-r--r--
   /usr/spool/uucp/mail.log	rw-rw-rw-
   /usr/lib/aliases		rw-r--r--

What I would like to do is to rename these files to

   /usr/lib/smail/paths		rw-r-----
   /usr/lib/smail/log		rw-r-----
   /usr/lib/smail/aliases	rw-r-----

and give them to the user "mail."  Smail should then be setuid to "mail."

Now, this scheme works as far as I can test, but in one area I have not
found a answer: what about security?  The only problem that I can find is
that if a user specifies alternate path or alias files, these files must
be readable by the user "mail."  Anyone done something like this with
smail?

An alternative would be to make the files above writeable by group and
have smail setgid to the "mail" group.  Comments?

  !       _
  ! !    Goran Larsson  [The Hacker of Hackefors]
--+-+    Hackefors, Linkoping, SWEDEN (See)  +46 13-155535 (Hear)
  +-+--  ...!uunet!sunic!liuida!prodix!isadora!hacker (Bang!)
  ! !    hacker@isadora.ikp.liu.se (at'n'dots)
    !                                                    Mmh, Yes