The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Security: How we did it

Christoph Lameter <clameter@waterf.org> writes:

> I dont think I have been lassez-faire in regard to the packages in
> Debian.  I have faithfully rendered the intended security schemes of
> the developers and I think that is the best one can do unless one
> intends to get involved in the development process.

I agree, you haven't been laissez-faire.  In fact, you've been very
"hands on" (rough antonym of the French).  You have made programs
setuid without reviewing the security implications, warning users
during installation, or taking steps to ensure that users couldn't
exploit the programs.

In short, you deliberately forced your strange theories about security
onto most Debian sites.

> We are here relaxed in that we can and do run potentially security
> hole prone applications (sendmail, dosemu, other tools) in our secure
> environment and that we have made for example access to the network
> diagnostic commands available for all administrators by default.

This paragraph is one long and drawn-out oxymoron.
 
> I dont think we stand a chance to make dosemu "completely secure" in
> an environment where you invite anybody on a system. Plus there is
> the great complexity of dosemu, the need to make DOS itself secure
> and the dosemu developers where no one really knows the complete
> system.
 
Can you type "chmod 755 /usr/bin/dos"?  If you can, you can make DOSEMU
secure.  Only people who already have root access can exploit it unless
there is a grievous kernel bug.  But, merely making DOSEMU setuid would
only make it possible to get root access.  To really make it easy, you
would have to do something silly like putting "all" in the users file.

Here is a little lesson on root access: you have to give it to someone
for them to have it.  Giving it away can mean more than giving someone
the root password.  It means you have to give someone the *means* to
get root access.  Making an unsafe program setuid root is a good
starting point, though.

> There are other issues more urgent in other parts of the Linux or
> Debian system as well, sometimes due to the very nature of Unix,
> sometimes unrelated to setsuid issues.

Any user destroying my system, reading my private files, and cracking
/etc/shadow isn't urgent?  One gets the impression you are somewhat
uncomfortable with the subject of security.

> One example: the very existence of a must world readable file like
> /etc/passwd.

Using shadow passwords fixes this.  Unless you install one of
Chrisoph's packages, of course.

-- 
Daniel Quinlan <quinlan@pathname.com>  |  finger quinlan@pathname.com for PGP
quinlan@transmeta.com (at work)        |  http://www.pathname.com/~quinlan/

--
Please respect the confidentiality of material on the debian-private list.
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-private-REQUEST@lists.debian.org . Trouble? e-mail to Bruce@Pixar.com