Aaron Stone wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-08-17 at 17:19 +0000, Michael Tabolsky wrote:
>> On Thu, 2006-08-17 at 17:29 +0200, Lars Kneschke wrote: 
>>> A webbased application has stored the database connection string in
>>> cleartext somewhere on the webserver. If you hack the webserver and get the
>>> sql connection setting you have access to the whole (imap)database. That's
>>> really bad.
>> well, AFAIK dbmail-imapd keeps SQL password in memory, and if you
>> figure how to get it out using some overflow you can get the password.
>> That's theoretically. I am not a h4zkor myself, but yet it seems to be
>> achievable unless dbmail-imapd uses some clever memory allocations
>> which disallow the prediction of where the variables are located in
>> the memory.
> 
> I do not have experience with this type of obfuscation, and I'll venture
> a guess that Paul does not, either. If someone on the list does have an
> idea of how it might work, and would like to explain it, post a patch,
> and it all makes sense, I'd go for it ;-)

We could access the password only just before when we need it: during
connecting, and forget about it when we're done.

However, if a hacker controls a dbmail program, he may as well be
considered to have read access to dbmail.conf. No easy way around that.

-- 
  ________________________________________________________________
  Paul Stevens                                      paul at nfg.nl
  NET FACILITIES GROUP                     GPG/PGP: 1024D/11F8CD31
  The Netherlands________________________________http://www.nfg.nl

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