slaying Gould dragon with a wooden horse

[Joseph S. D. Yao]

In article <836 at zeus.UUCP> bobr at zeus.UUCP (Robert Reed) writes:
>In <157 at houligan.UUCP> Dave Cornutt writes:
>    Any system, no matter how secure it is designed to be, is only as secure
>    as the people who run it make it.  If the searchpath problem was fixed,
>    Darryl still have gotten in by creating a Trojan-horse program in his
>    directory and convincing the superuser to run it.  ...
>... coincidence of two conditions:
>  1. That the search path tried the current working directory first.
>  2. That the system administrator would think nothing of using standard
>     utilities while running as root in that directory.
>It is one thing to build a trojan horse behind, say, ls; ... [another]
>administrator to run a user program WHILE IN A PRIVILEDGED ACCOUNT...
>know I would have real qualms about executing someone's xyz program while
>running as root.  But I might not even think about running ls, cat, more, or
>emacs.

I think that the point is, yes, those two are the specific hinge
for the technique used here; but it's not the only way the system
could have been broken.  As said above and elsewhere, PEOPLE are
what make or break a security system.  All the hardware and soft-
ware in the world can't make a system secure.  E.g., I won't tell
you where, but there's a perfectly good locked door I know of ...
with the key hanging on the lintel, so that people can get in and
out easily.  And: anybody remember how the kid in Wargames got the
school secretary's password?  PEOPLE, folks, are THE most important
part of ANY computer system!
-- 

	Joe Yao		hadron!jsdy at seismo.{CSS.GOV,ARPA,UUCP}
			jsdy at hadron.COM (not yet domainised)