Re: Forwared to me

[vermont () gate net (Illuminatus Primus)]

On Fri, 10 Jul 1998, Solar Designer wrote:

> > # mv /usr/bin/finger /usr/bin/finger.exe
> > # cat > /usr/bin/finger
> > #!/bin/sh
> > exec /usr/bin/finger.exe -m $*
> > ^D
> > # chmod +x /usr/bin/finger
>
> Hmm, weird, this doesn't look safe to me. Why trust the extra parsing done
> by the shell?

Which happens to include filename globbing.

This "fix" will now allow people to do:

finger '/*@hostname'..

Which could reveal a lot more information than finger was intended to..

Not to mention

finger '/*/*/*/*/*@hostname'

.. which might turn out to be a far worse DOS than the original attack.

If we are forced to use a shell,
#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/bin/finger -m "$*"

will prevent the arguments from being globbed, at least with my version of
bash (2.02.0(1)-release).

-Illuminatus Pimpus
 vermont () gate net