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Date:      Wed, 13 Jan 1999 10:02:59 +0100 (CET)
From:      Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai <asmodai@wxs.nl>
To:        FreeBSD Security <security@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   GIDs for new default system `users'
Message-ID:  <XFMail.990113100259.asmodai@wxs.nl>

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Hi guys,

I have a question/remark I am very well concerned with...

In the latest CURRENT /usr/src/etc/master.passwd there exist two new
users, mainly tty-sandbox and kmem-sandbox. These users are given the GID
of nogroup(65533). 

I recently had a whole discussion about user and group id's with our local
Unix guru and what he told me made perfect sense to me. What he said was
basically that every user or group can never be nobody or no-one since they
have an entry in the group or master.passwd file. He also told me that alot
of people make something like Squid and Apache members of nogroup/nobody
because these aren't accounts. IMHO that's completely wrong since they
belong to a group and can thus always be compromised and if alot of
programs are members of one group that means a lot of potential holes.

Is there something specific about nogroup btw, that it has this explicit
name? If not, if it's bascially the same as nobody, then I am all in favor
of moving those tty-sandbox and kmem-sandbox to their own group id's for
the sake of security...

Comments?

---
Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven    A veil of smoke is what I am,
asmodai(at)wxs.nl                         I wait and I wait...
Network/Security Specialist      <http://home.wxs.nl/~asmodai>;
BSD & picoBSD: The Power to Serve     <http://www.freebsd.org>;

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