First of did you read any but my original post? , please read the one I posted a little later. Hell! for your benifit I will reproduce it here:
quote---- Sorry to tear up the message, I forgot to paste this into my first one. You should also note that if you Run Tomacat as ROOT you may be more secure against a local user trying to sabotage your Tomcat but you will be vulnerable to malicious manipulations of your servlets. It is possible for somebody use a servelets that give access to files on the system tomcat is running on to read local files, provided this person knows the correct path. If you run Tomcat as ROOT and you must if you want to use privileged ports, you must be damn sure your firewall is properly configured and that your servelets can not be abused this way. This behaviour seems to be a strange peculiarity of Java. Apache for example simply accesses privileged resources as root and then downgrades the process to a less privileged level. A Java process however which you started as ROOT in order to access a privileged resource can not be downgraded to a lower privileged status/level after accessing that resoruce. At least as far as I know, I would be happy to find out if it is possible to downgrade the privileges of the tomcat process and any of its associated processes after accessing privileged ports. So the conclusion is that optimally tomcat shoud be started as root to access privileged ports and then downgraded by some means to a on a very restricted user accunt once it has accessed the privileged resoruces. This allows you to use default ports but the tomcat process will be running under the restricted UID, preventing malicious manipulation of servelets. quote---- This coin has two sides, on the one hand it his harder to hack the root account it self. On the other hand any publucly available service running under root is vulnerable. now comes the clincher, about point 2, I KNOW THAT! I still have the same friggin problem A) I am requiered to use Tomcat standalone. B) I do not have the option to use apache. c) I must run tomcat as root to use privileged ports. D) As far as I know and please enlighten me if I am wrong, there is no way, in java, to suid a process down after starting it as root to access privleged resources. Unlike Apache which I would be much more comfortable using, Tomcat as far as I know, does not offer the comfortable option of setting a "working" user and group in the httpd.conf file like Apache does. This leaves me with the option of running apache as a normal user and setting up some sort of a redirect service that runs as root which is a pretty unelegant solution compared to a tomcat that suid's it self down after accessing privileged resources. Cheers KR -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Follow cigar smoke, find fat man there.... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
