non-superuser chown(2)s considered harmful

[Neil Rickert]

In article <109958 at convex.convex.com> tchrist at convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) writes:
>I consider non-superuser chown(2)s harmful.  They screw up anyone who's
>trying to do post-facto disk accounting or pre-emptive disk quotas.
>
>It also ruffles my security feathers.  Various programs realize that they
>shouldn't source config files owned by someone other than the current
>user, such as vi and the csh.  If I make a /tmp/.exrc, and someone cd's to

 I wonder whether 'sendmail' checks for this.  If the system aliases
file contains :include:/path/name   as an alias, when the alias is
expanded 'sendmail' uses the permissions of the owner of the :include:
file for aliases such as "|program".  (permission of daemon for a root
owner).  If SystemV versions of 'sendmail' don't change this, and allow
giving away files, then anyone given access to manage a mailing list has
almost carte-blanche to execute programs as other people.

-- 
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  Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science               <rickert at cs.niu.edu>
  Northern Illinois Univ.
  DeKalb, IL 60115.                                  +1-815-753-6940