Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!husc6!rice!sun-spots-request From: dik@uva.UUCP (Casper H.S. Dik) Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun Subject: Re: making fingerd non-root Message-ID: <587@uva.UUCP> Date: 5 Jan 89 05:13:40 GMT References: Sender: usenet@rice.edu Organization: Faculteit Wiskunde & Informatica, Universiteit van Amsterdam Lines: 27 Approved: Sun-Spots@rice.edu Original-Date: 27 Dec 88 10:30:42 GMT X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 7, Issue 89, message 3 of 11 X-Issue-Reference: v7n75 mcgrew@topaz.rutgers.edu (Charles) writes: >Concerning setuid-ing fingerd to make it not run as root, can anyone think >of a reason of not setuid-ing finger to 'who'? That seems to be a fairly >inoffensive uid... > >Charles Making fingerd setuid to some 'innocent' user won't help. The man page for execve states: If a program is setuid to a non-super-user, but is executed when the real uid is 'root', then the program has the powers of a super-user as well. If you want fingerd to run as a unpriviliged process add a line setuid(some-uid); to the source. Casper Dik. Casper H.S. Dik University of Amsterdam | dik@uva.uucp The Netherlands | ...!uunet!mcvax!uva!dik [[ C'mon people, this really is a non-problem. The official "worm-killer" patch distributed by Sun (and available in the Sun-Spots archives) has the entire source to fingerd in it. The entire, recompilable, C source code. So go stick a line in the source that does a setuid(X) for some value X. --wnl ]]