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From: "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
To: Alan Glasser <alanglasser@gmail.com>
Cc: TUHS main list <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Two anecdotes
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2021 21:48:42 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <YZhiCpytvCeUX+/2@mit.edu> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <EC840092-F195-4C3D-886B-1370D80BAFC5@gmail.com>

On Fri, Nov 19, 2021 at 09:08:49PM -0500, Alan Glasser wrote:
> Most of the hundreds (thousands?) of Unix systems running in Bell
> Labs seemed to have well guarded root passwords. There was always
> social engineering, like Rob mentioned. And, of course, setuid root
> exploits that I enjoyed.

Does anyone remember the security vulnerability existed where
/bin/mail was setuid root, and you could issue the command "!/bin/ed
/etc/passwd" and the editor would be executed as root because
/bin/mail failed to drop the setuid root privs before executing the
shell escape?

When I was a Freshman at MIT I implementing some image processing
programming on an old Unix system for a Materials Science professor in
1987 as part of MIT's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program
(UROP).  It was some ancient Unix program, and to my amazement, the
/bin/mail security vulnerability was there even though it was a famous
security oopise that should have been patched long before.  I *think*
the system was some kind of AT&T Unix (not BSD) system, but I can't
remember the hardware or the specific Unix that was on the system.

Does anyone know how long and on which Unix variants this particular
/bin/mail setuid root vulnerability was around?

							- Ted

  reply	other threads:[~2021-11-20  2:56 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 8+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2021-11-19 22:41 Alan Glasser
2021-11-20  0:54 ` Rob Pike
2021-11-20  1:30   ` Jon Steinhart
2021-11-20  2:08     ` Alan Glasser
2021-11-20  2:48       ` Theodore Y. Ts'o [this message]
2021-11-20  3:08       ` John Cowan
2021-11-20 10:12       ` Ralph Corderoy
2021-11-21  2:05   ` Larry McVoy

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