Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 15 Apr 1999 23:27:04 -0400 (EDT) | From | "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <> | Subject | Re: caps in elf headers: use the sticky bit! |
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Date: Thu, 15 Apr 1999 16:07:35 -0700 (PDT) From: David Lang <dlang@diginsite.com>
As for the NFS issue, there are situations where NFS can be used in a (at least semi)secure environment. If the NFS traffic is on a dedicated LAN (often done for performance anyway) then the only way that NFS can be a problem is if one of your machines in hacked into anyway. The ability to use capabilities on NFS mounted files would significantly help in server farm situations.
So if I can manage to hack into one of your machines, (say, the one which is running the sendmail that didn't get updated to fix the sendmail security bug of the week) I get to break into all of the rest?!?
This is real security? I think not.
A real world example. you setup a web server farm with the common files/binarys NFS mounted.
Disk space is cheap these days. $300 USD will buy you 20 gigabytes of space; a complete Linux system worth of binaries is maybe 1, 2 gigs tops for a fully loaded system. If you're not willing to pay $15-30 extra per server so that each system can have its own copy of its system software, you're not serious about your system security.
Besides, running your server farm with standalone disk increases your performance and your robustness, since you remove a single point of failure. (If your NFS server crashs, your entire server farm goes out.)
This is why requiring NFS support is a real red herring as far as capabilities are concerned.
- Ted
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