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Date:      Fri, 19 Apr 2002 13:44:25 +0100
From:      Brian Somers <brian@freebsd-services.com>
To:        Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk>
Cc:        Brian Somers <brian@freebsd-services.com>, Garrett Wollman <wollman@lcs.mit.edu>, "J. Mallett" <jmallett@FreeBSD.org>, cvs-committers@FreeBSD.org, cvs-all@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: src/sys/kern kern_descrip.c kern_exec.c src/sys/sys filedesc.h 
Message-ID:  <200204191244.g3JCiPSg073492@hak.lan.Awfulhak.org>
In-Reply-To: Message from Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk>  of "Fri, 19 Apr 2002 13:35:57 %2B0200." <11657.1019216157@critter.freebsd.dk> 

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> In message <200204191125.g3JBPCSg072782@hak.lan.Awfulhak.org>, Brian Somers wri
> tes:
> 
> >I agree with Garrett.  This change is *very* broken.
> >
> >[...]
> >
> >Agreed, a program that does this is broken, but I believe the program 
> >needs to be fixed, not the kernel.
> 
> While I agree that this change is not quite orthodox, I don't think
> we can educate the masses of lousy programmers out there to not
> do stupid things any time soon.
> 
> I can't think of any programs that will break as a result of this,
> in particular I cannot think of any setuid programs which it will
> break.
> 
> OpenBSD has done this for a couple of years, and that hasn't rid us
> of Theo so it obviously is not a total catastrophy.
> 
> Finally, since this has not been discussed on any lists, I would
> expect this to be in reponse to some tangible threat, (most likely
> somewhere in ports ?)  so we probably don't have much of a choice
> anyway.
> 
> So can we avoid giving our security-officer a hard time for doing
> his job ?  Please ?

After looking into things further, it's Garrett's suggested 
alternative that I have a problem with.

  close(x)
  if (open(file, flags) != x)

is done in many places (bin/sh and usr.sbin/ppp to name two).  I 
can't think of anything ``usual'' that the committed change would 
break (except perhaps some standard).

> Thankyou!
> 
> -- 
> Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
> phk@FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
> FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
> Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.

-- 
Brian <brian@freebsd-services.com>                <brian@Awfulhak.org>
      http://www.freebsd-services.com/        <brian@[uk.]FreeBSD.org>
Don't _EVER_ lose your sense of humour !      <brian@[uk.]OpenBSD.org>



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