Re: Sun Patch Id #102060-01
Jon Peatfield (J.S.Peatfield@amtp.cam.ac.uk)
Wed, 21 Dec 1994 18:24:16 +0000
> Kinda sad, because passwd -F is mildly useful, and it's really really
> easy to make it secure: just permanently throw away all elevated
> privilege as soon as the -F is noticed on the command line. Then
> proceed to run as normal.
Well it may be useful in some environments (we used to use it to maintain a
proto-password file of allocated users), but it *never* worked properly if you
had shadow passwords switched on which was kind of sad. It always insisted on
looking in /etc/security/ for the password.adjunct which defeats the point of
having the -F option. When we heard about the -F security holes we did the
binary patch thing to remove the -F option. These days we live without it.
-- Jon
Jon Peatfield, Computer Officer, the DAMTP, University of Cambridge
Telephone: (+44 223) 3-37852 Mail: J.S.Peatfield@damtp.cam.ac.uk