Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: A new model for ports and kernel security? | From | Krzysztof Halasa <> | Date | 01 Oct 2003 22:10:02 +0200 |
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John Lange <john.lange@bighostbox.com> writes:
> My understanding is that this is a hold-over from ancient days gone past > where it was meant to be a security feature. Since only root processes > can listen on ports less than 1024, you could "trust" any connection > made to a low port to be "secure". In other words, nobody could be > "bluffing" on a telnet port that didn't have root access therefore it > was "safe" to type in your password.
It was for rlogin-like accesses, too - the server knew the client is a suid and trusted program. Think - NFS.
> Are not processes forced to run as root (at least at startup) that have > security holes in them not the leading cause of "remote root exploits"?
Not commonly. They usually change ownership to something like www.www and that is what the exploit gains first. -- Krzysztof Halasa, B*FH - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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