Re: Security in GNOME

["Michael K. Johnson" <johnsonm redhat com>]

Havoc Pennington writes:
>It did used to be otherwise, unfortunately.

OK, so I'm not as senile as I thought.  :-)

>However James has a sensible
>point about other possible holes... which probably apply to the PAM stuff
>as well.

PAM itself is clean in this regard, and the setuid helper has been
thoroughly vetted by several reviewers.  I think we're OK with it.

>We may need to think about how to avoid the problem; maybe with a
>custom entry widget.

No, that doesn't help -- you need to do the data sanitization in the
setuid part; if you don't sanitize all data in the setuid part, then
you are right back at ground zero in terms of security.

michaelkjohnson

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