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Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2011 15:13:36 +0200
From: Karel Zak <kzak@...hat.com>
To: Ondrej Vasik <ovasik@...hat.com>
Cc: Ludwig Nussel <ludwig.nussel@...e.de>, oss-security@...ts.openwall.com,
Nicolas François <nekral.lists@...il.com>
Subject: Re: /bin/su (was: CVE request -- coreutils -- tty
hijacking possible in "su" via TIOCSTI ioctl)
On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 12:50:47PM +0200, Ondrej Vasik wrote:
> On Wed, 2011-06-15 at 09:49 +0200, Ludwig Nussel wrote:
> > Bernhard Rosenkraenzer wrote:
> > > On Friday, June 10, 2011 11:55 CEST, Ludwig Nussel <ludwig.nussel@...e.de> wrote:
> > >
> > > > The issue also reminds me that there are several su implemenations.
> > > > On Fedora and SUSE we have a patched coreutils version, Debian uses
> > > > the one from shadow-utils and then there's also a su from
> > > > SimplePAMApps, used by e.g. Owl. Of course each one has it's own
> > > > quirks and weird features. Does anyone still remember why a
> > > > particular implementation was chosen? :-)
> > >
> > >
> > > In Ark Linux, we switched from the coreutils one to the shadow-utils one
> > > about 2 years ago because the shadow-utils one does what we need (incl. PAM
> > > support) without having to port the PAM patch on every new coreutils release.
> >
> > Upstream coreutils indicated that they consider su in coreutils kind
> > of deprecated, basically only kept for legacy reasons on non-Linux
> > OSes. They would accept the PAM patch though so distros don't need
> > to maintain it.
> >
> > Is there actually any serious distro that doesn't use PAM though?
> > Those #ifdefs to keep old shadow compatibility makes the code rather
> > ugly and hard to read. Maybe it's time to just rip out the old code
> > and submit a clean, PAM only su to util-linux.
No problem. I agree with the change.
> For me, having it in coreutils, shadow-utils, SimplePAMApps and possibly
> - in util-linux - could only cause a lot of confusion. Some
> consolidation might be better.
Some consolidation is necessary for many of your utils. I think that
a lot code in shadow-utils is currently unnecessary -- with PAM-only
utils we can probably simplify many things.
> Adding util-linux upstream maintainer to CC.
Thanks.
Karel
--
Karel Zak <kzak@...hat.com>
http://karelzak.blogspot.com
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