🚀 go-pugleaf

danno@css.itd.umich.edu (Daniel T. Pritts) writes:
> andrewd@tamsun.tamu.edu (Andrew T Duchowski) writes:
> > 3. A final note on installing CDPlayer or CDaudio: follow the 
> > instructions as to the setuid things.  Plus, make sure that both
> > programs are chown'ed to root.  I had them as operator, and I think
> > this may be the reason why when I pressed Load, I never got the 
> > prompt panel.
> 
> This may be a security hole.  I'd be wary of running anything which  
> allows access to the "mount" and "disk" commands as a setuid root  
> program for everyone on the system, although I haven't investigated  
> this thoroughly.

Dan is probably right on this.  Since we don't have the code to cdplayer,  
having it run as setuid root is probably pretty dumb of us all.  On the  
other hand, I do run it setuid root, which probably proves how dumb I am.   
The cdplayer program does all the mounts.

Ejects are done via the disk program.  The writeup suggests that /etc/disk  
be made setuid root.  I didn't like that idea at all, so I patched  
CDPlayer0.8 (the nextstep front-end to cdplayer) to reference  
/usr/local/bin/E_CD instead of the "/usr/etc/disk %s" that I noticed in the  
object module.  (that's probably not the exact string I replaced, as what I  
replaced had the same number of letters as /usr/local/bin/E_CD).

The E_CD file is a setuid root script with two lines, as follows:

echo "`/bin/date | /bin/sed -e 's/^....//' -e 's/E[SD]T 199.$//'`- ejecting  
CD-ROM: " > /dev/console
(/usr/etc/disk -e /dev/rsd2h) > /dev/console

Of course, I believe I saw somewhere else that scripts which are setuid root  
are also security problems.  Sigh.  On the other hand, I saw somewhere  
*else* that the setuid script problem did not apply to NeXTs.  Anyone know  
more about that?

--
Garance Alistair Drosehn     =     gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu
ITS Systems Programmer            (handles NeXT-type mail)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute;           Troy NY    USA