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Date: Fri, 3 Jan 2003 04:26:36 +0300
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: popa3d-users@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: Add (virtual) user perlscript

On Wed, Jan 01, 2003 at 03:54:32AM +0100, Tim van Erven wrote:
> I've written a simple perl script[1] to add users for popa3d when using
> the example database format for virtual domains as implemented in
> virtual.c.  It isn't very userfriendly in that it could be a security
> risk if directory permissions aren't set correctly.  However, it might
> be useful as a starting point for creating a custom setup.

Thanks.

I've added a link to it to the contributed resources list on the
popa3d homepage.  I'd like to also place it in contrib/ on my FTP (and
thus on all the mirrors), but before that you might want to fix two
things:

1. You have the auth files readable by group popa3d.  Why?  That
shouldn't be needed and only makes things worse in case of a user
popa3d compromise.

2. You set $virtual_mail_owner to user mail.  It would be safer to use
a dedicated pseudo-user (or better yet, a pseudo-user per domain, but
that may be harder to configure in your delivery agent).  The reason
it's not good to re-use user mail is that in this case popa3d is granted
a privilege it doesn't need: ability to access the entire global mail
spool.  Should there be a post-authentication vulnerability in popa3d,
it would now allow to destroy all mail on the system or, even worse,
place traps in /var/{spool/,}mail that would result in a subsequent
root compromise via other mail-related services you might have.  This
setup goes against the design of popa3d.

> See my mail to the debian-security mailing list[2] for a description of
> the setup I'm using it on.
> 
> Tim
> 
> 1. http://gene.wins.uva.nl/~talerven/software/
> 2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-security/2002/debian-security-200212/
>    msg00103.html (this should of course be on a single line) 

-- 
/sd

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