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Re: Linux Virus



On Fri, Mar 30, 2001 at 05:46:19PM -0800, Karsten M. Self wrote:
> 
> Hmm...dual-booting considered harmful.  Interesting.  
> 
> Short version being that relying on OS filesystem protections to keep
> you from mangling your system files is an invalid assumption if:
> 
>   - You're booting multiple OSs.
>   - One or more of the OSs offers filesystem access to others.
>   - The filesystem access doesn't respect user-level permissions offered
>     by the host OS.
> 
> Very interesting.

the other OS need not supply its own filesystem access either.
windows and MacOS neither have a clue what ext2 is, and simply ignore
ext2 partition types (0x83 or Apple_UNIX_SVR2).  however for windows
there is a program (or used to be) which would read the raw ext2
partition and parse the filesystem on its own, making it accessable to
the windows side.  permissions are obviously not enforced.  

macos has a (rather broken) extension which allows ext2 filesystems to
mount like any other mac filesystem.  it was read-only last i checked,
and barely worked, i think the author abandoned it.  in any event it
ignored permissions as well.  (since the underlying OS has no clue
what permissions are) 

your only hope really is to only boot securable OSes, for the windows
side use NT or W2K and not 9x or ME, and be sure to configure it to be
secure (don't login to users in the administrators group, fix the
broken filesystem permissions etc)

> You're not paranoid.  They really *are* out to get you.

;-)

-- 
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/

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