non-superuser chown(2)s considered harmful
Tiggr
rcpieter at svin02.info.win.tue.nl
Mon Dec 10 01:02:32 AEST 1990
rickert at mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
>In article <660691624.18045 at mindcraft.com> karish at mindcraft.com (Chuck Karish) writes:
>>How should permissions be set on extraction from an archive? Should
>>setuid bits be honored?
> They probably should not be honored. But changing the rules to not honor
>suid bits on extraction from tar tapes sure would make life more difficult
>for vendors when they distribute new binary software releases.
The 07000 bits *should* be honoured to be able to do proper backups (as
root). If chown is a privileged call (as in BSD) normal users always
extract files with the user's userid, and root may choose to force
uid=0 or to use the uids as present in the tarchive. Using this scheme
there is no problem (the mere idea of being able to do something to a
file as a normal user, causing that you must become superuser to undo
it is horrible anyway).
Just my two BSD-minded cents,
Tiggr
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