Re: Troff dangerous.

From: Friedrich Delgado Friedrichs (friedelat_private-HAMBURG.DE)
Date: Wed Jul 28 1999 - 02:01:38 PDT

  • Next message: Marco S Hyman: "Re: Troff dangerous."

    Hi!
    
    Aaron Campbell schrieb am Dienstag den 27. Juli 1999, um  0 Uhr 45:
    > On Mon, 26 Jul 1999, Nic Bellamy wrote:
    >
    > > I've also checked OpenBSD 2.5 and FreeBSD 3.2 - the groff on both systems
    > > defaults to the unsafe behaviour.
    >
    > OpenBSD-current has been fixed to pass the -S (safer mode) option to groff
    > from the nroff.sh script. Please see the following URL:
    >
    > http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/gnu/usr.bin/groff/nroff/nroff.sh
    Thanks for this hint. IŽd like to add, that it appears on a SuSE Linux system
    (only checked SuSE 6.1) /usr/bin/nroff is a shellscript, which calls groff.
    Additionally if you execute less on a manpage, groff is called via
    /usr/bin/lesspipe.sh.
    
    Both Scripts default to the unsafe behaviour. Thus viewing manpages with less
    (unless you set the Environment variable LESSSECURE [with 3 'S'!] which
    actually should be named MORESECURE imho ;-) ) is also dangerous.
    Imagine *evaluating* manpages that are packed with sources, and mistakenly doing
    it with less... Oops!
    
    Inserting the -S flag into /usr/bin/nroff and /usr/bin/lesspipe.sh calls to
    groff fixes the Problem.
    
    This might help on several other systems.
    
    > Since we were on the subject of a fairly *cough* minor *cough* security issue
    > I thought I'd bring this up.
    ---Zitatende---
    Minor it might be, and old as well. But nevertheless it annoyed my and several other
    People quite a lot (if i look at this thread.) It annoyed me especially since i am
    very used to using less instead of more.
    
    Regards
    	Friedel
    --
    	Friedrich Delgado Friedrichs <friedelat_private>
    



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