Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!uwm.edu!spool.mu.edu!think.com!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!shelby!leland.Stanford.EDU!baroque.Stanford.EDU!jim From: jim@baroque.Stanford.EDU (James Helman) Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi Subject: Re: /usr/bin/under Message-ID: Date: 2 Mar 91 20:47:03 GMT References: <88458@sgi.sgi.com> Sender: news@leland.Stanford.EDU (Mr News) Distribution: usa Organization: Stanford University Lines: 24 In-Reply-To: rpw3@rigden.wpd.sgi.com's message of 1 Mar 91 22:29:30 GMT You lose the ability to log the user session in /etc/utmp and /etc/wtmp, and thus lose the ability to "see" the user with "w" and "who". Depending on your taste, this may or may not be a worse security problem than having "xterm" be setuid root. The security loss from this is minimal as a user can inhibit utmp logging by invoking xterm with the '-ut' switch. As far as I know, xterm does not log to wtmp at all. Another problem (which also occurs under SunOS) is that if xterm is not setuid root, the root ownership and 666 mode of the pty are not changed. This breaks mesg(1) and biff(1) and allows any user to read or write to your pty. This does does have some security ramifications. On the other hand, I don't know of any security holes in xterm related to it being setuid root. -jim Jim Helman Department of Applied Physics Durand 012 Stanford University FAX: (415) 725-3377 (jim@KAOS.stanford.edu) Work: (415) 723-9127