Re: Slackware 8.0, 7.1 Vulnerability: /usr/bin/locate

From: Dylan Griffiths (Dylan_Gat_private)
Date: Thu Aug 02 2001 - 17:07:00 PDT

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    Brian Smith wrote:
    > It's apparently something that's changed in later versions of Slackware.
    > Here's one from my machine, which was originally Slack3.5 (before going
    > through several upgrades, of course):
    > 
    > -rw-r--r--   1 root     root       740500 Aug  1 04:03 locatedb
    
    This happened because:
    
    # This updates the database for 'locate' every day:
    40 04 * * *       cd / ; updatedb 1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null
    
    was moved from 
    
    /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root
    to
    /var/spool/cron/crontabs/nobody
    
    Because, when run as root, everyone who ran GNU locate could see whatever
    files root could see (such as other people's how directories).
    
    I suggest you either upgrade Slackware to slocate (
    http://www.geekreview.org/slocate/ ) which is safe to run as root since its
    locate will check if you're allowed to see the files in shows, or assign
    each subsystem its own UID (which is a good idea anyways :)).
    
    Hopefully someone who con officially fix Slackware (Pat, Dave, Chris, etc)
    can get a solid fix into the base distro.
    --
        www.kuro5hin.org -- technology and culture, from the trenches.
    



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