From owner-freebsd-security Wed Aug 8 15:35:19 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-security@freebsd.org Received: from wrath.cs.utah.edu (wrath.cs.utah.edu [155.99.198.100]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 64F6537B401; Wed, 8 Aug 2001 15:35:04 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from danderse@cs.utah.edu) Received: from faith.cs.utah.edu (faith.cs.utah.edu [155.99.198.108]) by wrath.cs.utah.edu (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id f78MZ3L10346; Wed, 8 Aug 2001 16:35:03 -0600 (MDT) From: David G Andersen Received: (from danderse@localhost) by faith.cs.utah.edu (8.11.1/8.11.1) id f78MZ2p10632; Wed, 8 Aug 2001 16:35:02 -0600 (MDT) Message-Id: <200108082235.f78MZ2p10632@faith.cs.utah.edu> Subject: Re: finger/fingerd & home directory permissions To: yar@FreeBSD.ORG (Yar Tikhiy) Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2001 16:35:02 -0600 (MDT) Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, security@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: <20010809020831.B44660@comp.chem.msu.su> from "Yar Tikhiy" at Aug 09, 2001 02:08:31 AM X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL2] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Lo and behold, Yar Tikhiy once said: > > In the case of local access, it's no problem, since anyone may read > /etc/passwd directly. OTOH, letting remote folks peek at user > information even if the user wants to hide himself is a bad thing. > > The issue I'd like to submit to discussion is what way to choose: > > a) Add a command-line option to finger(1) and fingerd(8) telling > them not to reveal user information if the user's homedir is > protected. > > b) Similar to a), but hide such users by default. > > c) Don't bother at all :-) > > Personally, I'd prefer b) since it's most secure and seems to break > nothing. Do I overlook any complications? Yes - it breaks the semantics of the existing fingerds that people are used to. It's a gratuitious change with little benefit that would simply confuse people who have a reasonable expectation about what the default behavior of 'finger' should be. Don't do (b). -Dave -- work: dga@lcs.mit.edu me: dga@pobox.com MIT Laboratory for Computer Science http://www.angio.net/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-security" in the body of the message