[20870] in bugtraq
Re: Mail delivery privileges
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Wagner)
Tue Jun 5 16:31:40 2001
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From: daw@mozart.cs.berkeley.edu (David Wagner)
Date: 4 Jun 2001 06:48:32 GMT
Message-ID: <9ffb00$ls2$1@abraham.cs.berkeley.edu>
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David Wagner wrote:
>Peter W wrote:
>>To protect users from each others' ~/.forward instructions, it is necessary,
>>as Wietse said, for the delivery agent to start with superuser privileges.
>
>[...] Imagine: ~/.forward-program could be a
>setuid executable, owned by the user, and a non-root delivery
>agent could exec() the relevant ~/.forward-program. [...] What am I missing?
Many folks responsed privately (thanks, all!). Here's a summary.
- It doesn't work if home directories are on a partition mounted nosetuid.
(Fix: Put the .forward-program elsewhere.)
- You have to be very careful when writing a setuid ~/.forward-program.
(Agreed.)
- Writeable home directories are very dangerous. (Agreed.)
- A more problematic issue is that a malicious user can gain access to
the uid that the delivery agent runs under by calling setuid(2)
or by simply stripping the setuid bit off of their ~/.forward-program.
(Uh oh...)
I must admit that I had not anticipated this last attack, which is
a very serious threat. It seems to me that it might be possible to
defend against this attack, if the appropriate mail delivery agent
runs under a 'nobody'-like uid with absolutely no privileges. However,
this may be tricky to configure safely, and the fact that I overlooked
one subtle attack leaves some reason to be concerned that there may be
other even more subtle attacks lurking in the shadows. I think we can
say that it might be possible to make my proposal work, but the details
appear to be non-trivial.
Thanks to Peter W., Greg Woods, Chris Siebenmann, Emmanuel Galanos,
Steve Bellovin, Henrik Nordstrom, and Roman Werpachowski for comments.
