On Sun, Feb 25, 2001 at 11:45:28AM +1100, Brian May wrote: > > If I had access to chgrp, then I also have access to chmod, so I don't > see any security benifit. yeah i don't either, i suppose if its being done through a little shellcode exploit it would add a tad bit more difficulty in theory... > false sense of security? Again, if you can write to the file, chances > are you can reset the s bit, too. in this case perhaps not, think of a 4777 /usr/bin/passwd. (that would be stupid anyway but...) > Ethan> in the future if you have to change this quickly do > Ethan> something like: > > Ethan> chgrp postdrop /usr/bin/postdrop ; chmod g+s > Ethan> /usr/bin/postdrop > > But then you can't do > > find / -gid 104 | xargs chgrp 105 yup > so the way I see it, this "security measure" actually is a "security > risk" because you have to replace the simple command line above with > something more complicated that saves/restores the permissions. good point, i agree the s removal on chown/chgrp seems largely silly, one other argument i can think of is it avoids foot shooting in some cases but this is unix your allowed to shoot yourself in the foot if you wish ;-) but in this case i think you would have to take it up with the kernel developers or the standards people. i know at least BSD does this too so its not a linux specific thing by any means. -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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