Re: /etc/shells (was Re: procmail)

[deraadt () theos com (Theo de Raadt)]

First off; I thought the Bugtraq list was for discussion of new
security holes, not for talk about redesigning existing subsystems.

Can we please stay on topic? Signal is dropping in ratio lately.

Ob. Security hole fix:

If anyone wants to see a really secure rdist setup that solves all
the problems (all the problems *I* know about..), take a look at the
OpenBSD sources.

-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  bin  212992 Aug  6 21:12 usr/bin/oldrdist*
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  bin  229376 Aug  6 21:12 usr/bin/rdist*
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  bin  163840 Aug  6 21:12 usr/bin/rdistd*

Note they are not setuid.  "oldrdist" is the old original rdist with
all the known bugs fixed and modified to callout to "rsh" for setting
up the connection.  The "rsh" callout code is borrowed from new
"rdist"; "rdist" is the latest 6.1 version with some more fixes by us.
Since "oldrdist" and new "rdist" are not protocol compatible, it is
important to have both.  New "rdist" was written to know how to
callout to "oldrdist" if it discovers the older protocol (or something
like that).

I am also happy to see that new "rdist" uses mkstemp() which makes it
`safer' to ship a dist which contain writable directories.

Thanks to Todd Miller for doing most of this work, I'm quite happy
with it (I noted some of the problems but did none of the fixing)

Who knows, some of you might indirectly benefit from this stuff.