locate

[insanity () acidtrip alaska edu (Ian Otsane)]

There is a minor problem with the "locate" command that comes with linux (or
perhaps other machines too).  You can use it to look into other people's
directorys (assuming that you keep the database up to date, and the database
file is world readable, as is the default).  Just type "locate /home/username"
and you get a complete list of what they have.  A possible modification to
fix this would be to either make the locate database chmod 600 (which would
deny everyone all access) or to make updatedb only record entries which are
in world readable directories.

Not a big problem, but it does give users access to something they should not
have.

Also, pppd comes suid root under slackware (and probably most other linux
distributions).  People can use this to set up a ppp connection using whatever
ip address they want (as default there are no restrictions set).  This would
make rhosts file exploitable (among other problems).  Most of these linux
distributions come with way too many suid root files.  I unsuided all but at,
cron, chsh, newgrp, passwd, chfn, deliver, keyinit (for skey), sendmail, and
su, and my system seems to run fine (of course I usually only use it logged
on as root).  Most of the daemons in /etc/inetd.conf don't need to be there
either, especially for personal machines.