Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!bellcore!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!snorkelwacker!spdcc!ima!minya!jc
From: jc@minya.UUCP (John Chambers)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: abolishing /etc/passwd (was Re: anonymous ftp, and the dangers thereof)
Message-ID: <404@minya.UUCP>
Date: 12 Jun 90 03:10:21 GMT
References: <9006060704.AA02343@WLV.IMSD.CONTEL.COM> <37166@think.Think.COM>
Lines: 44

In article <37166@think.Think.COM>, barmar@think.com (Barry Margolin) writes:
> In article <9006060704.AA02343@WLV.IMSD.CONTEL.COM> sms@WLV.IMSD.CONTEL.COM (Steven M. Schultz) writes:
> >just a "thought" - if the (shadow)file is non-world readable and the
> >system is administered "correctly" then why bother with
> >encryption at all ;-)
> 
> I'm not sure how non-serious that smiley represents.  The serious answer is
> that even system administrators should not be able to find out a user's
> password.  Sure, they don't need to know the user's password to violate the
> user's files.  But if they know someone's password then they could
> accidentally (or through coercion) divulge it to someone else.

Some years back, I saw an enlightening instance of all of the above.
The participants shall remain nameless; the OS was Univac's EXEC8 on
the 1108, for which every file had both a read and a write password.
The system stored these internally in an unencrypted form, and one
of the local games was to try to find holes in the system that let
one access them.  One of the holes was intentional:  There was a
system utility that would list files and their passwords, so that
an administrator could delete files.  One administrator was rather
unpopular with users; and one day he got a bunch of guys in the
EE and physics departments especially mad at him, so they changed
their files to have a read password that was a well-known sexual
verb starting with 'f', and a write password that was his name.
They took no further action.

At the next campus-wide users-group meeting, he got into a dispute
with some of them, and in the heat of the moment, he made some rather
disparaging remarks about the nature of people who would use obscene
insults about him as their passwords.  They didn't respond.

The next day, they all wrote letters to his superiors complaining about
the fact that he had, in a public meeting, made statements that enabled
listeners to guess the passwords on their files.  It was perhaps just a
coincidence, but in very short order he no longer worked there.

Myself, I was satisfied with finding one way to do raw disk I/O that
showed a few such passwords, then I went on to more interesting work.

-- 
Uucp: ...!{harvard.edu,ima.com,mit-eddie.edu}!minya!jc (John Chambers)
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Cute-Saying: It's never to late to have a happy childhood.