Difference in Ultrix (uucp/uu{en,de}code)
David Herron, NPR Lover
david at ukma.UUCP
Fri Feb 28 01:15:03 AEST 1986
A friend who runs an Ultrix machine ran across an interesting
change with uucp on Ultrix. (He's not done much with Unix
before. I was giving him some software, using uuencoded files
to get it there, but he had troubles unpacking it).
For some reason uu{en,de}code are owned by uucp and set[ug]id
to boot! WHY????? It was very surprising for my friend when
he said "uudecode file" and it said "file: permission denied"
or whatever that protection message is. And then he su'd to
try again as root and still got the same message! Sheesh.
Why did DEC do this? (uu{en,de}code in the 4.2 distribution
gets installed owned by root and no set[ug]id, so DEC definitely
changed this...)
Fortunately this isn't a security hole. I created a uuencoding
of /bin/sh, editted the file to put set[ug]id to the resulting
file, then uudecoded it. The file was owned by uucp, but not
set[ug]id.
--
David Herron, cbosgd!ukma!david, david at UKMA.BITNET, david at uky.csnet
^
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Postmaster for Kentucky
"'New and improved' is a misnomer" -- David Herron, 1986
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