On Wed, 28 Sep 1994 01:02:48 EDT, John Hawkinson said: > Excuse me? > > When we say FIXING THE KERNEL, we MEAN DISABLING SETUID SCRIPTS. > > If you have some other reasonable mechanism, I'd be interested in > hearing it... Well, I have heard from some people who understand this rat's nest of race conditions that most, if not all, the holes can be closed if your kernel has proper support - basically, you need the /dev/fd file descriptor driver, and instead of simply exec()'ing the #! interpreter with the file as input (which is subject to a race condition), you launch the interpreter with a /dev/stdin already nailed down to the original (dev,inode) pair, thus prohibiting substitution on the fly. That's another mechanism, it's reasonable, but it's not 100% backward combatable... Valdis Kletnieks Computer Systems Engineer Virginia Tech