Hi Hartmut, Sorry for my snide remark...
>> This hypothetical attacker is trying to escalate privileges. I don't >> see how starting an unprivileged process would help with that. > > Well, simply by an exploiting a bug in that software. This is a quite > common case :-) It is my understanding that exploiting a bug in that software can not help gaining access to privileges that the exploited software does not have, since this would be a kernel bug. All attacks that I'm aware of buffer overflow, cross site scripting, sql injection rely on inserting some code that gets run. But this code shares the process of the vulnerable program so by extension it shares it's privileges. If an attacker already has the privileges required to start the software I don't think it's possible to gain any more privileges unless that software has the setuid bit set. But I have a tendency to oversimplify things, because it gives me the feeling that I understand it =P David
