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Re: getspnam-support
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From:
John Macdonald
Date:
December 5, 1999 19:56
Subject:
Re: getspnam-support
Message ID:
199912060342.WAA24088@elegant.com
Tom Christiansen <tchrist@jhereg.perl.com> writes:
|| Ok, fine. Let's assume that you have both getpwnam() and getspwnam()
|| available from a program. If an attacker is going to tickle a Perl
|| program with a buffer-overrun exploit, he can trivially make *ANY PERL
|| PROGRAM* call getspwnam(), even those scripts that don't appear to use it.
|| In fact, although it isn't pretty, I have it on reasonable authority
|| that a buffer-overrunnable program can, given enough work, be made to
|| call anything in any shared library that you like to.
More likely than an attacker being able to take advantage of
this is the possibility of a bug in a program dumping the wrong
field and printing the actual password instead of '*'.
|| So, given that the BSD getpwnam behaviour makes no difference when it
|| comes to buffer overruns, could you please explain some *other* sort
|| of exploit to which we would now be vulnerable given the current set-up
|| but which under the painful separate calls, we would not be?
||
|| Keep in mind, please, that if the status quo were altered, that you
|| wouldn't just be breaking existing code. You'd be breaking existing code
|| which had been written to perform some sort of security-minded operation.
|| I'd say that this rather ups the ante of whether to break things.
And it could also be fixing some code that was *not* written to
perform some sort of security-minded operation but which was
given security-critical data anyhow and is a security leak
waiting to be noticed.
--
John Macdonald jmm@jmm.pickering.elegant.com
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