Re: numerous free/paid account systems are vulnerable to privledgeselevation attacks

[Alexander Schreiber <alexander.schreiber () INFORMATIK TU-CHEMNITZ DE>]

Hi!

On Fri, 10 Nov 2000, Michal Zalewski wrote:

> This problem is not related to any specific product or solution, but
> affects pretty huge part of the ISP installations. The problem is a direct
> effect of the default account creation policy launched by OpenBSD, RedHat,
> and some other vendors, where every user has it's own, corresponding gid.

Debian 2.2 (potato) default install checks for this:

<cite>

boromir:~# adduser kmem
adduser: The group `kmem' already exists.

</cite>

You can create such a user with the useradd tool, but useradd defaults
to give this user gid 100 (users). You can of course explicitly specify
group kmem, but then
 - you are root,
 - you use useradd instead of the do-all-and-be-happy adduser
so you can be expected to know what you are doing.

Regards,
       Alex.

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