It is unfortunate that RedHat's SU keeps the same environment and
specially the same PATH as this leaves the user open to a trivial
attack: either a user who places a malicious program in his $HOME/bin
and then tricks root for using su from the same terminal instead of
doing a full login or, a program who installs malicious code into the
$HOME/bin (and madifies the .profile to place it at the head of the
PATH) like a fake 'ls' who excs the noraml 'ls' if used by normal user
but destroys data if the user is using it as root (after using SU, the
user will have the same path so it will be the trojan 'ls who will be
executed uinstead of the noraml one).
Caldera does this a bit better, it resets environment so they don't
have this security problem, but not completely right as that means
losing the contents of the DISPLAY and HOME variables (the loss of the
later one means the application will be unable to handle the proper
cookie to X).
--
Jean Francois Martinez
Project Independence: Linux for the Masses
http://www.independence.seul.org
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