On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 05:11:33PM +0200, Efraim Yawitz wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>       I was just wondering what could be done against the following 
>       seemingly huge security hole in Linux (or any Unix-type system).
> 
>       The system call mknod can only be used by root to make special 
>       device files, but once those files exist they can be copied by 

How exactly? I don't think so.

>       anyone.  What is to stop me from becoming root on my own machine and 
>       creating a whole set of /dev files which are world-readable and 
>       writable, putting them in a tar archive and then untarring that on 
>       another machine where I would now have raw access to all the 

Did you try that? Doesn't work for me.

>       devices.  It seems like the only safeguard against such a thing 
>       would be to prevent users from bringing any files into the system, 
>       but this is ridiculous if Internet access is to be allowed.
> 
>       Any reactions?  Am I making some obvious mistake?

Just one more note - it's recommended, on multiuser machines, to mount
any user-writable filesystems with '-o nodev' (among other things).
This usually means having /var,/tmp,/home maybe others as independent
filesystems.
-- 
Didi


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