oss-sec mailing list archives
Re: xscreensaver package caps gets raw socket
From: "David A. Wheeler" <dwheeler () dwheeler com>
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2021 11:01:54 -0400
On Sat, 17 Apr 2021 at 07:41:15 -0700, Tavis Ormandy wrote:Oh, I also pitched using popen("/bin/ping" ..), but I think nobody is really convinced that will work, but I kinda like it :)
On Apr 18, 2021, at 8:25 AM, Simon McVittie <smcv () debian org> wrote:
That's consistent with the principle of least-privilege, and the widely cited Unix philosophy of having programs that do one thing well. If you need to gain privileges, then I think that's a much, much better approach - ideally a new ping-like program that prints a machine-readable syntax rather than having to screen-scrape human-readable output, but if that's not available then ping itself is the next best thing.
I agree, running “ping” in a separate process is FAR better than giving the “main” process extra permissions it doesn’t actually need. You’d have to be careful about the parameters sent, but that’s necessary anyway. I don’t see the problem of calling /bin/ping, that sounds like the right answer. Scraping is undesirable, but sometimes needed. If this is a common need, a long-term solution might be to create an option on ping to generate a standard format that’s easier to machine-parse. --- David A. Wheeler
Current thread:
- xscreensaver package caps gets raw socket Tavis Ormandy (Apr 17)
- Re: xscreensaver package caps gets raw socket Tavis Ormandy (Apr 17)
- Re: xscreensaver package caps gets raw socket Érico Nogueira (Apr 18)
- Re: xscreensaver package caps gets raw socket Solar Designer (Apr 18)
- Re: xscreensaver package caps gets raw socket Alan Coopersmith (Apr 18)
- Re: xscreensaver package caps gets raw socket Simon McVittie (Apr 18)
- Re: xscreensaver package caps gets raw socket David A. Wheeler (Apr 19)
- Re: xscreensaver package caps gets raw socket Ariadne Conill (Apr 19)
- Re: xscreensaver package caps gets raw socket David A. Wheeler (Apr 19)
- Re: xscreensaver package caps gets raw socket Ariadne Conill (Apr 19)
- Re: xscreensaver package caps gets raw socket Eli Schwartz (Apr 19)
- Re: xscreensaver package caps gets raw socket Stuart Henderson (Apr 19)
- Re: xscreensaver package caps gets raw socket David A. Wheeler (Apr 19)