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Bugtraq archives for 4th quarter (Oct-Dec) 1994: Re: UIDS < 0?

Re: UIDS < 0?

Pug (pugarlut.utexas.edu)
Sun, 23 Oct 1994 09:26:04 -0600 (CDT) 

> At LISA VIII, someone in the Automounter BOF brought up the fact (I
> don't recall why) that under AIX, if your 'nobody' userid was greater
> than 65-thousand-something, it would wrap (due to the limitation of a
> longint uid field and 32-bit userids).  This didn't seem like a big deal,
> except that they also said that by having negative userids, there were
> big security holes opened up.  Anyone know what these are?  I've been
> playing with a nobody with a uid of 70000, and haven't found anything...

As I remember the AIX nfs bug (as well as some other vendors I
believe), if you have a UID that has the lower 32-bit field set to 0,
you had a problem. This means that despite what your account started
at, it equated it as root.

Ciao,

-- 
Richard Bainter          Mundanely     |    System Analyst        - OMG/CSD
Pug                      Generally     |    Applied Research Labs - U.Texas
          pugarlut.utexas.edu         |    pugbga.com
Note: The views may not reflect my employers, or even my own for that matter.