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Bugtraq archives for 4th quarter (Oct-Dec) 1995: Re: Does the shared lib bug work on any suid program ?

Re: Does the shared lib bug work on any suid program ?

Casper Dik (casperHolland.Sun.COM)
Wed, 8 Nov 1995 10:20:17 +0100 

>Testing if (EUID != UID) before using env variables for dynamic
>linking is obviously a good point. But what about testing
>if EUID or UID equal to zero as well ? Indeed, there are
>few situations where you want root to run a program with
>custom library path : root has to be sure about the code it executes.

Too many people install broken software and want to run it
as root (broken == requires LD_LIBRARY_PATH to be set).

So while in theory a good thing, in practice it is not.

And it's also why su, login and sendmail strip dangerous LD_* variables.

>Root trusting "foreign" libraries isn't certainly a good thing, even
>if on some systems, standard dynamic libraries belongs to "bin" in
>vendor's configuration ;-)

Agreed.  (Yes, I know Solaris 2.x does that too, so don't complain
to me about it)

Casper