non-superuser chown(2)s considered harmful

[Tiggr]

rickert at mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:

>In article <660691624.18045 at mindcraft.com> karish at mindcraft.com (Chuck Karish) writes:
>>How should permissions be set on extraction from an archive?  Should
>>setuid bits be honored?

> They probably should not be honored.  But changing the rules to not honor
>suid bits on extraction from tar tapes sure would make life more difficult
>for vendors when they distribute new binary software releases.

The 07000 bits *should* be honoured to be able to do proper backups (as
root).  If chown is a privileged call (as in BSD) normal users always
extract files with the user's userid, and root may choose to force
uid=0 or to use the uids as present in the tarchive.  Using this scheme
there is no problem (the mere idea of being able to do something to a
file as a normal user, causing that you must become superuser to undo
it is horrible anyway).

Just my two BSD-minded cents,

Tiggr