On Jan 3, 2008 4:09 PM, Dennis Peterson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The success of this requires a bit of serendipity as well. If for reasons of > convenience the new TMPDIR is globally writeable then nothing has been > accomplished > which is why a global TMPDIR declaration is pointless.
Well, yes and no. Let's take the following case: 1) You're using software which creates then executes a temporary file as .progname.day-of-month 2) The attacker knows this and has a remote attack to populate this file in /tmp to give themselves root access 3) You've globally defined TMPDIR to be /tmp/42/ 4) Attack fails Ok, it doesn't help against a local attacker (and then you're in trouble anyway), but against any remote attack making assumptions about the location of temporary files it has some value. Besides, I made no statement about global declarations ;) -- Please keep list traffic on the list. Rob MacGregor Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he doesn't become a monster. Friedrich Nietzsche _______________________________________________ Help us build a comprehensive ClamAV guide: visit http://wiki.clamav.net http://lurker.clamav.net/list/clamav-users.html