[19031] in bugtraq
Re: SuSe / Debian man package format string vulnerability
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Seth Arnold)
Tue Feb 6 00:46:07 2001
Mail-Followup-To: Darren Moffat <Darren.Moffat@eng.sun.com>,
BUGTRAQ@securityfocus.com
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Message-ID: <20010205193219.A28281@willamette.edu>
Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2001 19:32:19 -0800
Reply-To: Seth Arnold <sarnold@WILLAMETTE.EDU>
From: Seth Arnold <sarnold@WILLAMETTE.EDU>
X-To: Darren Moffat <Darren.Moffat@eng.sun.com>
To: BUGTRAQ@SECURITYFOCUS.COM
In-Reply-To: <200102060134.f161YlR299519@jurassic.eng.sun.com>; from
Darren.Moffat@eng.sun.com on Mon, Feb 05, 2001 at 05:34:47PM -0800
* Darren Moffat <Darren.Moffat@eng.sun.com> [010205 19:24]:
> Exactly what is it that man MUST do to perform the job of turning nroff
> man pages into viewable text ?
It is setuid <some user> in order to store pre-formatted manpages
around, so that future invocations do not have to format the manpage. It
is intended to allow simple source pages to be shipped (compressed in
the case of at least Debian) so that PostScript versions can be
generated, in addition to the simple text-viewable versions -- and still
allow for frequently-accessed manpages to load as fast as shipping the
formatted versions of manpages.
It is interesting to note that OpenBSD does not use the source pages by
default -- only the processed plaintext 'cat'pages are installed. This
prevents the need for set(gd)id man applications, and problems such as
this.
--
``Oh Lord; Ooh you are so big; So absolutely huge; Gosh we're all
really impressed down here, I can tell you.''
