Subject: Re: Executable shell scripts
From: Bernd Petrovitsch <bernd@firmix.at>
To: Mark Rosenstand <mark@borkware.net>
Cc: arjan@infradead.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
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Organization: http://www.firmix.at/
Date: Sat, 13 May 2006 13:56:03 +0200
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On Sat, 2006-05-13 at 13:45 +0200, Mark Rosenstand wrote:
> Bernd Petrovitsch <bernd@firmix.at> wrote:
> > On Sat, 2006-05-13 at 13:03 +0200, Mark Rosenstand wrote:
> > [...]
> > > A more useful case is when you setuid the script (and no, this doesn't
> > > need to be running as root and/or executable by all.)
> > 
> > Apart from the permission bug: This has been purposely disabled since it
> > is way to easy to write exploitable shell or other scripts.
> > Use a real programming languages, sudo or a trivial wrapper in C ....
s/languages/language/

And I forgot to mention that a kernel patch is another possibility.

> It isn't a bug on systems that support executable shell scripts.

I never wrote that (or anything which implies that directly).

> Doing security policy based on programming language seems weird at
> best, especially when the only user able to make those decisions is the
> superuser.

It boils down to "how easy is it for root to shoot in the foot"?
And the workarounds are somewhere between trivial and simple.

> Obviously the security-unaware people over at the OpenBSD camp must be
> completely clueless when they don't disallow the superuser to do this.

Of course this doesn't change the level of security but it plays with
the risk ....

> I'm looking forward to the day where I'm no longer allowed to make
> changes to /etc/ld.so.conf because it's a system file.
> 
> Anyway, is it possible to enable this functionality?

Yes.

	Bernd
-- 
Firmix Software GmbH                   http://www.firmix.at/
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