[m-dev.] Libraries Idea

[Peter Schachte]

On Tue, Sep 21, 1999 at 11:31:09AM +1000, Warwick Harvey wrote:
> Peter Schachte wrote:
> > > 3.  On a multi-user / shared installation, how does one assure that file 
> > > ownership and permissions are appropriate so that (a) anybody can cause a 
> > > new grade to be installed, (b) a grade installed by one user can be used by 
> > > another, and (c) no user can do malicious things to the installation.
> > 
> > An suid program?  What do TeX installations do so that generated fonts
> > can be shared?  This is basically the same problem.
...
> Another program I've seen cache generated files in this way is some versions 
> of "man".  These run setuid, and cache the processed versions of man pages 
> so they don't need to be re-processed if they're used again soon.  I've 
> _heard_ that these kinds of systems have a history of security-related 
> problems, and thus are somewhat out of favour with the security-conscious.
> 
> In any event, I'd be *very* concerned about a setuid solution to this 
> problem.  It just seems too likely to be vulnerable to exploitation.

Hmmm.  Ok, how about a setgid program?  There'd be a
make-library-grade program/script owned by root, group mercurylib, and
the Mercury library grade tree and library source trees would be the
same, and all with mode 664.  So only this one program/script could
write library object files, and the script would always work by
compiling the write-protected library source files.

It sounds pretty safe to me, but I'm certainly no unix security
expert.

-- 
Peter Schachte                     What we are looking at is good and evil,
mailto:schachte at cs.mu.OZ.AU        right and wrong. A new world order!
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~schachte/      -- George Bush 
PGP: finger schachte at 128.250.37.3  
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