Re: Setuid

[Tom Lees <tom@lpsg.demon.co.uk>]

On Mon, 18 Nov 1996, joost witteveen wrote:

> And, if I put the svga_init() call as the first thing in main(), 
> gs will _always_ say
>   Using some svgalib driver
> This looks confusing, if gs draws on my X screen.
> 
> The other option, making the wrapper setuid root, looked even less
> attractive to me: Althought the wrapper knows what device gs wants
> to use, I alreadly had one bug in my wrapper (buffer overrun), and
> I am quite glad it wasn't setuid then.

Why not use POSIX (or whatever) saved-uids. Switch straight out of root by
swapping euid and uid as soon as the program starts, then swap again just
before calling svga_init(). This puts the security risks to a minimum.

-- 
Tom Lees <tom@lpsg.demon.co.uk>
== Linux debian 2.1.10 #14 Tue Nov 19 16:31:18 GMT 1996 i486 ==

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