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Date:      Wed, 18 Nov 1998 10:48:19 +0100
From:      Andre Albsmeier <andre.albsmeier@mchp.siemens.de>
To:        William McVey <wam@sa.fedex.com>
Cc:        freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Would this make FreeBSD more secure?
Message-ID:  <19981118104819.A1664@internal>
In-Reply-To: <199811161838.MAA25024@s07.sa.fedex.com>; from William McVey on Mon, Nov 16, 1998 at 12:38:11PM -0600
References:  <199811161838.MAA25024@s07.sa.fedex.com>

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On Mon, 16-Nov-1998 at 12:38:11 -0600, William McVey wrote:
> [ This is a fairly long reply.  The last paragraph has some 
>   info related to xterm's need for root permissions of possible
>   interest. ]
> 
> I'm in favor of the proposed change to allow some group (for discussion
> sake, lets call it group 'shadow') read permission to the shadow file.
> Unfortunatly, it's not enough.  The getpwnam (and family) needs to be 
> modified to base their access method on access to the file as opposed to 
> a "root or not-root" check.  The routine __initdb() in 
> /usr/src/lib/libc/gen/getpwent.c seems to be the place to make the change...
> (I code the propose "patch" very quickly, it should defintly be reviewed).
> 
> before:
> 	p = (geteuid()) ? _PATH_MP_DB : _PATH_SMP_DB;
> 	_pw_db = dbopen(p, O_RDONLY, 0, DB_HASH, NULL);
> 	if (_pw_db) {
> 		[code]
> 
> after:
> 	if((DB *)0 == (_pw_db=dbopen(_PATH_SMP_DB, O_RDONLY, 0, DB_HASH, NULL))) {
> 		_pw_db = dbopen(_PATH_MP_DB, O_RDONLY, 0, DB_HASH, NULL); 
> 	}
> 	if ((DB *)0 ==_pw_db) {
> 		[code]
> 

Looks good!

As I said, I hope I will have time to make experiments this weekend.
We may not forget the code that touches /etc/master.passwd and
/etc/spwd.db for writing. I think this will be mainly pwd_mkdb and maybe
others. We have to be careful here...

	-Andre

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