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- Path: sparky!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!ogicse!reed!horde
- From: horde@reed.edu (Mr. Heiji Horde)
- Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.sysadmin
- Subject: Re: Security leak or bug?
- Message-ID: <1992Aug26.183027.6687@reed.edu>
- Date: 26 Aug 92 18:30:27 GMT
- Article-I.D.: reed.1992Aug26.183027.6687
- References: <HARDY.92Aug24163755@golem.ps.uci.edu> <1992Aug26.090053.28832@unibi.uni-bielefeld.de>
- Organization: Twisted Genius Rehabilitation Center, a Division of MHE
- Lines: 39
-
- In article <1992Aug26.090053.28832@unibi.uni-bielefeld.de> mib@bio128.uni-bielefeld.de writes:
- >6. REMOVE any pd apps you received in binary form. NEVER AND I MEAN NEVER
- > install pd binaries on ANY machine. If you can't get the source for the pd
- > stuff then don't install it.
-
- Hmm...sounds like most of the NeXT apps I've seen out there. Especially
- some that are fairly useful to our users.
-
- >7. Give the machines a boot password. Anybody can bring a NeXT to single user
- > mode and change password
-
- Are you talking about a hardware password? I sure hope you don't forget it.
- What we do here is simply have "exec /bin/login -p root" as the last
- line of /.profile. Works well.
-
- Here's a few that you missed:
- A) Make sure you remove "decode" alias from /usr/lib/aliases. I was only
- mildly amused when some tried to break in that way. Good thing we
- don't run sendmail here, otherwise it would have worked.
- (okay, so you mentioned this in #5, just not explicitly)
- B) There's something involving IFS and "some setuid root program". None
- of us here have been able to duplicate this. No fix either because
- you'd need to patch /bin/sh and you need source for that.
- C) Go through the password file and make sure no accounts have home
- directories in /tmp. It was annoying that ALL our NeXT stations came
- that way. Took no time to become user "daemon" using this. And daemon
- to root takes only a bit longer.
- D) People who administrate NeXTs on the INTERNET should really go through
- Chapter 16 of the Network and Systems Administration manual. They
- describe some of the things you must do to secure your NeXTs since
- they shipped open (like several other systems). The one about getting
- netinfo to give you the password file is probably something to look at.
-
- -Heiji
-
- ===========================================================================
- Mr. Heiji Horde (Non NeXT mail only please) e-mail: horde@reed.edu
- All insane acts are done in affiliation with Madd Hacker Enterprises
- The opinions expressed here are stolen from the person next to me.
-