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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 ?

Darren Reed (avaloncoombs.anu.edu.au)
Fri, 10 Nov 1995 00:32:51 +1100 

In some mail from Casper Dik, sie said:
>
> >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).
[...]

A good way around this is installing "extra" shared libraries in another
directory (not /usr/lib) and in your rc files, change ldconfig to be
something like:

ldconfig /usr/lib /usr/openwin/lib /usr/X11/lib /usr/local/lib

or

ldconfig /usr/lib /opt/lib

etc.

darren