Re: Troff dangerous.

From: Ronny Cook (ronnyat_private)
Date: Sun Jul 25 1999 - 19:23:30 PDT

  • Next message: Pavel Kankovsky: "Re: Troff dangerous."

    > Date:         Sun, 25 Jul 1999 10:18:20 -0400
    > From: John Robert LoVerso <johnat_private>
    >
    > This isn't a problem with "troff" or any of it's varients.  Instead,
    > this is an exploit purely with "groff", the GNU reimplementation.  Troff
    > doesn't have the file stream or ".pso" requests; those are purely part
    > of groff.
    >
    > Thus, this affects only systems with groff installed (all Linux and FreeBSD
    > systems, at least).
    >
    > John
    >
    The original nroff had a ".pi" command (which only worked for nroff, not
    troff). It pipes the output of the nroff command to a particular program,
    although no command line arguments could be supplied. (This is according to
    the "Nroff/Troff User's Manual", section 19: "Input/Output File Switching".)
    
    I agree it's a concern, although having the man pages writable in the
    first place is something of a risk if you ask me... I would think that the
    principle of least privilege would apply.
    
    		...Ronny
    --
     Ronald Cook, Technical Manager - Message Handling Systems/The Message eXchange
     Email: ronnyat_private ----- Phone: +61-2-9550-4448 ---- Fax: +61-2-9519-2551
    



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