From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2007 07:19:55 -1000 From: Tim Newsham To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] security In-Reply-To: Message-ID: References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Topicbox-Message-UUID: dbac5f74-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 > but assuming you have multiple users on your system, how do you > propose that a target be tricked into cd'ing into a trojaned directory > and attempt to execute the magic command. what would this trojaned > command do? without setuid (or a superuser), the options are more > constrained. How about forking off a server process that lets me execute arbitrary commands as you? How about placing trojan processes in your person bin directory? How about subtly corrupting all of the writable data in your filesystem? How about setting up a spam bot on your machine? Using your machine as part of a distributed denial-of-service attack against some other networked machines? How about replacing your compiler with one that introduces errors nondeterministically? Changing your acme to occasionally not save your data? If you sit down and think of it for a little bit you'll notice this is just the tip of the iceburg. There are lots of irritating things that can happen even without setuid or a super user. > - erik Tim Newsham http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/