Bugtraq mailing list archives
Re: root permissions
From: frank () manua gsfc nasa gov (Frank Chen)
Date: Fri, 26 Aug 1994 09:20:53 -0500 (EDT)
From: kevintx () paranoia com (KevinTX)
Well, this is not a bug but a question on the design of most Unix systems. It seams to me, and I tried this on Ultrix 4.3, HPUX 9.01, Linux 1.1.x, when root opens a file, being the owner or not, the system does not check the file permissions before granting him access. The same goes for writting and unlinking a file.I've long considered this to be "wrong" as well. Forcing root to have to obey whether something is allowed to be writable by root would close up a lot of the various holes out there. Of course this creates problems with things like the traditional "passwd" program that would then have to know to do a chmod to give root write perms to the password file..
I've also considered that to be "wrong". But if you want to 'chmod', you will need to change the permission of the directory if the directory happened not to be writable? There must be lots of situations that root my log itself out if root does not 'bypass' the permission check. -Frank Chen
Current thread:
- Re: root permissions Frank Chen (Aug 26)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: root permissions Norman Wilson (Aug 26)