On Wednesday 30 August 2006 01:45, Alex Merry wrote: > On Tue, Aug 29, 2006 at 11:33:26PM +0400, Vladimir A. Pavlov wrote: > > I mean a user able to read a file can disassemble it and find > > security holes in it. > > Although it would probably be easier to download the sources and look > at those...
An attacker doesn't know exactly what optimization flags and/or patches were applied by an administrator when building ping (or another S[UG]ID) executable. For example, AFAIK RedHat uses lots of patches some of which aren't really necessary. Some patches (and I think CFLAGS/LDFLAGS) can cause different errors in the application that were absent in the original source (or, in the case of *FLAGS, that were invisible if compiling without optimization) so it's more reliable to use the binary rather than the source. As well as it's _much_ more harder to. -- Nothing but perfection pv -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
