Subject: Security hole in smail - be careful!
From: [email-masked] (Martin Bartosch)
Date: Thu, 6 Oct 1994 14:57:37 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce

Hi,

last night I discovered a potential danger to all sites that run smail.
A quick check on some other sites (thanks to the folks on #linux)
revealed that most systems are affected by this.

Essentially, the smail bug will allow ordinary users to create files
anywhere they want to:

Assume /usr/lib/sendmail is a softlink to /usr/bin/smail.

$ /usr/lib/sendmail -d -D/etc/i_am_broken noone@universe
$ ls -l /etc/i_am*

Be aware of this. Some sites even come up with permissions rw-rw-rw-!
This behaviour is not affected by -smtp-debug.

				Just my $0.02.

					Martin.

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Martin Bartosch       Institut fuer               [email-masked]
38102 Braunschweig    Datenverarbeitungsanlagen   [email-masked]
+49 531 332214        TU Braunschweig             

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