Re: [Fwd: Truth about ssh 1.2.27 vulnerabiltiy]

From: Jeff Long (longat_private)
Date: Mon Oct 04 1999 - 10:49:38 PDT

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    If I understand your question correctly, the agent code only does a
    chown on the directory where the socket will be stored.  Plus it only
    does the chown if it had to create the directory (as root).
    
    Hard links are also not a problem as bind() doesn't overwrite existing
    files and you can't create a hard link (using ln) to a non-existing
    file.
    
    At least this is how it all appears to work on Digital/Compaq Tru64
    Unix.
    
    Jeff Long
    
    Rush Carskadden wrote:
    >
    > I don't have Digital, nor do I fully understand the order that things
    > get executed, but wouldn't it be possible to create a hardlink to a file
    > that I (as a user) want access to in /tmp/ssh-<username> , allow it to
    > get chown'd to me, then do as I please? It seems as though regardless of
    > the protection from the symlink problem, my file still gets chown'd.
    > Please forgive (educate) me if I am missing something.
    
    <snip>
    > Seeing the race problems with the previous two patches I thought I would
    > take a shot at one.  It changes the effective uid/gid to the user
    > logging in before doing the bind() (and then resets them after) which
    > seems to take care of the problem.  It also chown's the
    > /tmp/ssh-<username> directory before doing the bind in the case that it
    > did not already exist so that the user owns it before performing the
    > bind.  On Digital Unix 4.0D this seems to take care of the problem.  The
    > bind() will fail if a symlink exists to a file that the user would
    > normally not be able to write to (such as /etc/nologin).  The only other
    > difference after logging in is that the socket will now be owned by the
    > user instead of root but I can't think of a reason why this would be
    > bad.
    >
    > If anyone sees problems in this patch please let me know.
    >
    > Jeff Long
    



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