Re: what's next for the linux kernel?

From: Lennart Sorensen
Date: Wed Oct 05 2005 - 10:55:41 EST


On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 04:42:26PM +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> i have no idea. as a user, i just did rm -fr /tmp/* (sorry - not
> rm -fr /tmp) and it worked.
>
> as a user.
>
> not root.

Then some admin didn't qualify for root having apparently removed the t
bit from /tmp making it a world writeable dir. Ouch.

> they weren't dumb enough to give it to me.

But they made /tmp world writeable it seems. Impresive. :)

> ahh, that would answer the implicit question as to why they
> jumped up and down at me rather than frog-marched me off campus.

Yep. What you did should have been prevented by the system. So the
system was misconfigured.

> i was a student there. they didn't let _anyone_ like me have root.
>
> someone got into trouble for even demonstrating a security
> vulnerability.

Well this one sounds more liek a major misconfiguration than a security
problem. Well allowing people to mess with temp could be seen as a
security problem but only until the permissions were fixed back to what
they would have originally been when the system was installed.

Len Sorensen
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