Bugtraq mailing list archives
Re: root permissions
From: peter () haywire DIALix COM (Peter Wemm)
Date: Fri, 26 Aug 1994 21:17:19 +0800 (WST)
KevinTX writes:
Well, this is not a bug but a question on the design of most Unix systems. It seams to me, and I tried this on Ultrix 4.3, HPUX 9.01, Linux 1.1.x, when root opens a file, being the owner or not, the system does not check the file permissions before granting him access. The same goes for writting and unlinking a file.I've long considered this to be "wrong" as well. Forcing root to have to obey whether something is allowed to be writable by root would close up a lot of the various holes out there. Of course this creates problems with things like the traditional "passwd" program that would then have to know to do a chmod to give root write perms to the password file..
What about adding an option to the open() system call? eg: open("/etc/passwd", O_WRONLY | O_ROOTPRIVS, 0); That would allow a privileged file open to be explicit request rather than an "accident". Still, I wonder if it'd buy anything? Would slack programmers use the flag on everything? At least, it'd solve the chmod inconvenience. -Peter
Current thread:
- Re: core symlinks, (continued)
- Re: core symlinks Terje Normann Marthinussen (Aug 26)
- Re: core symlinks pluvius (Aug 25)
- Re: core symlinks Thomas D. Nadeau (Aug 25)
- Re: core symlinks Thomas D. Nadeau (Aug 25)
- Re: nfsbug Steve Salvini (Aug 25)
- Re: nfsbug Christopher Klaus (Aug 25)
- Re: nfsbug Rafi Sadowsky (Aug 25)
- root permissions Aleph One (Aug 25)
- Re: root permissions KevinTX (Aug 25)
- Re: root permissions Paul Robinson (Aug 26)
- Re: root permissions Peter Wemm (Aug 26)
- Re: nfsbug Christopher Klaus (Aug 25)