Re: CERT Advisory CA-95:02.binmail.vulnerabilities

[karl () bagpuss demon co uk (Karl Strickland)]

> > The CERT Coordination Center thanks Eric Allman, Wolfgang Ley, Karl
> > Strickland, Wietse Venema, and Neil Woods for their contributions to
> > mail.local.
>
> Last billing there Neil, though I note its in alphabetical order. It
> does seem a little thick headed that cert, in its wisdom, did not simply
> refer people to several 8lgm advisories already on the subject. As for the

To be fair to CERT, we were given early access to a number of versions
of mail.local before this one was released.  Neil analyzed - in detail -
countless versions of mail.local and provided code to fix the remaining
problems.

> "mail.local" not been perfect - what are they advising? the installation of
> something less that perfect as far as root-bugs are concerned? 
>
>       "But mom, I'm only a little bit pregnant"
>
> > From my examinations of mail.local, its fine unless you can write to the mail
> spool directory. If you can, then its raceable.

Why is it raceable?

-- 
------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------
Mailed using ELM on FreeBSD               |                    Karl Strickland
PGP 2.3a Public Key Available.            | Internet: karl () bagpuss demon co uk
                                          |