Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Thu, 11 Jun 1998 16:46:25 -0400 (EDT)
From:      Robert Watson <robert@cyrus.watson.org>
To:        "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
Cc:        jbryant@unix.tfs.net, Niall Smart <njs3@doc.ic.ac.uk>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: [Fwd: Secure Ping 1.0] 
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.3.96.980611163515.378K-100000@fledge.watson.org>
In-Reply-To: <3902.897596586@time.cdrom.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Thu, 11 Jun 1998, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:

> Perhaps the kind of idiot who also knows that it makes about as much
> sense to "secure" a system that way as it does to install a locking
> door on a cardboard shack. :-)
> 
> There are enough free shell accounts given out on the net that any
> reasonably determined newbie cracker can compile something somewhere
> else or just use the copy of PERL which is invariably found somewhere
> to do socket manipulation.  You can't really control the creation or

Or better yet, sh and telnet, and cat /dev/zero?

> importation of strange executables onto your system, but what you can
> control is the execute bit itself.  My first intro to this was what
> Paul Vixie first did on gatekeeper.dec.com - joblow could log in and
> FTP over all the ICMP killers they wanted, but any attempts to chmod
> them executable would just be silently ignored - it was blocked at the
> syscall level.  I also believe there it was a kernel variable he could
> just set and unset with the debugger to turn this off when he himself
> needed to install something, but FreeBSD could probably more
> effectively key off the secure level and have "no new execs" as a
> kernel option to go along with a securelevel > 1, or something.

I personally like the LKM someone wrote here at TIS that replaces all
open() syscalls with filenames that are .gif files with opens to a
specific gif file that is a picture of dilbert.  Makes most web pages look
great. :)

Interpretters make the no new exec behavior not-so-useful in the real
world, unfortunately.

  Robert N Watson 

Carnegie Mellon University            http://www.cmu.edu/
TIS Labs at Network Associates, Inc.  http://www.tis.com/
SafePort Network Services             http://www.safeport.com/
robert@fledge.watson.org              http://www.watson.org/~robert/


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?Pine.BSF.3.96.980611163515.378K-100000>