[514] in Athena Bugs
A bug with the deactivate script
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (vanharen@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Thu Jul 14 18:21:32 1988
From: <vanharen@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
To: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 14 Jul 88 18:20:08 EDT
Program with which you had the problem: /etc/athena/deactivate
Name of person who discovered the bug: Chris VanHaren
Their MIT phone number: 225-9418
Their MIT address: MacGregor H418
Their Athena Login ID: vanharen
Name of consultant reporting bug: Chris VanHaren
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A brief synopsis of the problem:
The deactivate script should detach remote filesystems before
cleaning out /tmp. If a filesystem is mounted on /tmp, any
world-writable files get removed.
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Please describe the problem in detail (mention any necessary files or
commands that may be involved, on which machine the bug happened, and what
the program did that was wrong):
This is not necessarily a "bug", but rather a suggestion for a
better method of operation -- if the /tmp directory were cleaned after
remote filesystems (NFS's) were detached, the possibility that a naive
user's directory being wiped out would be reduced, if not eliminated.
This would involve the re-arrangement of the structure of
"/etc/athena/deactivate", but should not be a significant amount of work.
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Repeat by (please enter a set of commands which will allow us to
repeat the bug):
Attach a world-writable directory with world-writable files in
it to /tmp (attach -m /tmp), and allow the machine to deactivate.
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Fix (if you know what it is):
Re-write the deactivate script, or not allow root to remove
files from remote filesystems, even if the files are world-writable. I
believe no mapping between the server and client is necessary to remove
world-writable files, though I may very well be wrong.
