Re: root permissions
Frank Chen (frank@manua.gsfc.nasa.gov)
Fri, 26 Aug 1994 09:20:53 -0500 (EDT)
> From: kevintx@paranoia.com (KevinTX)
> > Well, this is not a bug but a question on
> > the design of most Unix systems. It seams to me, and
> > I tried this on Ultrix 4.3, HPUX 9.01, Linux 1.1.x,
> > when root opens a file, being the owner or not, the
> > system does not check the file permissions before
> > granting him access. The same goes for writting and
> > unlinking a file.
>
> I've long considered this to be "wrong" as well. Forcing root to have to
> obey whether something is allowed to be writable by root would close up a
> lot of the various holes out there. Of course this creates problems with
> things like the traditional "passwd" program that would then have to know
> to do a chmod to give root write perms to the password file..
>
I've also considered that to be "wrong". But if you want to 'chmod', you
will need to change the permission of the directory if the directory happened
not to be writable? There must be lots of situations that root my log itself
out if root does not 'bypass' the permission check.
-Frank Chen