A security hole

[Mike Clarkson]

In article <130 at heart-of-gold>, jc at heart-of-gold (John M Chambers x7780 1E342) writes:
> I do understand why I wouldn't want to turn off these setuid and setgid bits.
> In my experience, rnews is very often triggered by things (like cron) that
> are run by root, and I've seen a lot of problems caused by news files ending
> up owned by root rather than news.  I wouldn't trust news run by root, and I
> don't trust cron to correctly run things under other ids;  I've had too many
> surprises there to believe that I can reliably control cron.  So the setuid
> and setgid bits are needed to guarantee that cron can't start rnews up with
> root permissions.  This seems to me to restrict incoming news to only those
> directories with news write permissions.  If I'm wrong, I'd like to know, so
> I can start looking for other ways to do the job.

Use su in your crontab:

	0 * * * * su news -c "rnews -U"

Then rnews (or whatever command you like) will run as news, not root.
Also wise to do this with anything else you really don't need root to
be running: like uucico.


-- 
Mike Clarkson						mike at ists.UUCP
Institute for Space and Terrestrial Science
York University, North York, Ontario,
CANADA M3J 1P3						(416) 736-5611