Re: screen question/problem.

From: Jason Stone (jason-fbsd-security@shalott.net)
Date: 09/25/02 

Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2002 12:40:23 -0700 (PDT)
From: Jason Stone <jason-fbsd-security@shalott.net>
To: <freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

> Screen likes to be root so it can do things like update utmp (or wtmp,
> whichever).

I've been wondering about this for a while - on my personal systems, I've
always created a group wtmp and made utmp/wtmp/lastlog group wtmp, group
writable, and screen, xterm, etc, setgid wtmp instead of setuid root.

This seems to me to preserve that portion of the functionality (I know
that screen also likes to be setuid root for other reasons) while being
substantially safer than having everything just be setuid root.

Am I missing something? Are there other implications to using a wtmp
group and setgid binaries? I think that this would be a nice change to
make to the base system if it's reasonable to do so.

 -Jason

 -----------------------------------------------------------------------
 I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's
 too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry
 that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say "Daddy, where
 were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?"
        -- Mike Godwin

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (FreeBSD)
Comment: See https://private.idealab.com/public/jason/jason.gpg

iD8DBQE9khEnswXMWWtptckRAjjjAJ9hkCgYyKKH+qeZRHKNdloQ1SLkVQCgry8u
fA9+H2QI1m17qLq3vJaSnRo=
=2mTl
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-security" in the body of the message