Re: CVE Request -- logrotate -- nine issues

[Solar Designer <solar () openwall com>]

On Fri, Mar 04, 2011 at 12:05:02PM -0500, Steven M. Christey wrote:
> If there's a common usage scenario that doesn't stem from blatant 
> administrator negligence, then a CVE is probably still appropriate. 
> ("blatant admin negligence" might be, say, if an admin arbitrarily makes a 
> script setuid, or modifies the perms for an executable or config file to 
> be world-writable.)

I think that "chmod 777 /var/log" is "blatant admin negligence".  As to,
say, "chown nginx /var/log/nginx", it could be negligence or it could be
lack of familiarity with the risks involved.  So I am willing to admit
that it's not necessarily negligence that turns those issues into
vulnerabilities on specific systems.

> We will sometimes write the CVE description more as an "adminisrator 
> practice" than as "fault of the software."

Oh, this is something I did not realize.  A lot of people assume that
CVEs "blame" the software and its authors for having made an error.

It felt wrong, say, to blame a text editor for being unsafe to use on
files in untrusted directories when such unsafety was the typical and
expected situation for text editors in general.

Thank you for your responses!

Alexander