Follow @Openwall on Twitter for new release announcements and other news
[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 00:09:09 +0100
From: Christoph Pleger <Christoph.Pleger@...tu-dortmund.de>
To: Josh Bressers <bressers@...hat.com>
Cc: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: CVE id request: GNU libc: NIS shadow password  leakage

Hello,

On Friday 08 January 2010 23:11:50, Josh Bressers wrote:

> I may be missing something here, or perhaps I'm not remembering correctly,
> but NIS basically doesn't have any security in this respect. This bug
> implies that a user has some sort of access to the NIS client, but the NIS
> server would happily hand out the same data if the malicious user asked for
> it (not using glibc let's say). While this may be a glibc bug (I doubt it,
> as it would just be a false sense of security), I this this is a non issue.

No, that's not true. I have no experience with Linux NIS servers, but when the 
NIS server runs on Solaris (Sun Microsystems is the inventor of NIS), the 
shadow password information, which is in the passwd.adjunct.byname map, on 
the NIS clients can only be seen by root. When other users call for 
example "ypcat passwd.adjunct.byname", they get an error message that the map 
does not exist. Also, on Solaris NIS clients, the shadow password cannot be 
seen with getpwnam. 

Regards
  Christoph 

Powered by blists - more mailing lists

Please check out the Open Source Software Security Wiki, which is counterpart to this mailing list.

Confused about mailing lists and their use? Read about mailing lists on Wikipedia and check out these guidelines on proper formatting of your messages.