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Re: UIDS < 0?

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Pug)
Sun Oct 23 11:36:42 1994

From: Pug <pug@arlut.utexas.edu>
To: holland@engg.ksu.edu (Rich Holland)
Date: Sun, 23 Oct 1994 09:26:04 -0600 (CDT)
Cc: bugtraq@fc.net
In-Reply-To: <199410230350.WAA17619@godiva.ne.ksu.edu> from "Rich Holland" at Oct 22, 94 10:50:26 pm

> At LISA VIII, someone in the Automounter BOF brought up the fact (I
> don't recall why) that under AIX, if your 'nobody' userid was greater
> than 65-thousand-something, it would wrap (due to the limitation of a
> longint uid field and 32-bit userids).  This didn't seem like a big deal,
> except that they also said that by having negative userids, there were
> big security holes opened up.  Anyone know what these are?  I've been
> playing with a nobody with a uid of 70000, and haven't found anything...

As I remember the AIX nfs bug (as well as some other vendors I
believe), if you have a UID that has the lower 32-bit field set to 0,
you had a problem. This means that despite what your account started
at, it equated it as root.

Ciao,

-- 
Richard Bainter          Mundanely     |    System Analyst        - OMG/CSD
Pug                      Generally     |    Applied Research Labs - U.Texas
          pug@arlut.utexas.edu         |    pug@bga.com
Note: The views may not reflect my employers, or even my own for that matter.

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