Date: Sun, 24 Nov 1996 18:09:10 -0700 (MST) From: Nate Williams <nate@mt.sri.com> To: peter@taronga.com (Peter da Silva) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Replacing sendmail (Re: non-root users binding to ports < 1024 (was: Re: BoS: Exploit for sendmail smtpd bug (ver. 8.7-8.8.2 Message-ID: <199611250109.SAA27018@rocky.mt.sri.com> In-Reply-To: <199611250041.SAA08169@bonkers.taronga.com> References: <199611250006.KAA25958@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> <199611250041.SAA08169@bonkers.taronga.com>
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> > "Sendmail is the de-facto Unix standard mail delivery agent. Is is > > continually subjected to rigorous security scrutiny and frequently > > updated. > > Don't make me laugh. It has more security holes revealed per year than > every other setuid program in UNIX put together. It is also the most used/public suid program in the world, subject to the most scrutinity (and attack). I'm with Michael. I trust sendmail much more than something I know nothing about. Sendmail is scrutinized, and Qmail isn't. I'm 99.9% sure that Qmail has at least one security hole in it that someone could drive a truck through, but it simply hasn't been found. Have I looked at the code to know this? No, but at some point in time Qmail *has* to have 'root' prividedges, and it's *really* hard to make sure that when a mail-transport agent becomes root that they've squashed any chance of the input causing problems. The input to Qmail may not be run as root, but somehow that input must be written to a user's file or run through a users .forward or other processing agent, and that's where *all* of the bugs lie. Nate
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