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Re: [ITP] libsuexec 1.0


> In Windows, it is the 'SYSTEM' user which starts up most services, thus in effect
> acting as the Unix 'root' user. The difference is that SYSTEM has uid '18', while
> root has uid '0' in Unix.

No, there are much larger differences between a capability based system
and this.  With capabilities, whatever you call a "root" user might not
even exist and if it does, it might not have the capabilities you're
associating with "root" on a classical UNIX system.

> So, if porting from Unix to Cygwin one could just look for all occurances of uid '0'
> and replace them with '18'. Actually, this technique has been used to create the
> current Cygwin port of the Procmail program.

That's a long winded way of saying that these programs are not capability-aware.

> As of Win7 and Win2003 this will no longer work. For security reasons, the privilege
> needed to impersonate another user (called 'SeCreateTokenPrivilege') has been
> removed from the SYSTEM user.
>
> Services (daemons) who need impersonation now have to be started by non-SYSTEM
> users, which have been put in the 'Administrators' group and granted the
> SeCreateTokenPrivilege. This works for most suid software, like the Apache
> webserver, but not for Sendmail and Procmail.
>
> Both programs *enforce* what is called the Capabilities model. This means that both
> programs actually check if they are ran by root and if not, refuse to deliver
> e-mail. So, simply replacing '0' with '18' in the source code has no effect.

No, actually they have no idea what a capability is and use the UID as a
proxy for certain capabilities.  Which is wrong when actual capabilities
come into play.

> The solution
> ------------ 
> The solution to this problem turns out to be very simple and elegant: *tell*
> Sendmail and Procmail who is the root user by overriding functions which involve
> getting or setting user id's. 
>
> For instance: make the getuid() function return '0' when the actual user id is '18'
> and make the setuid() function change to uid '18' if the requested uid is '0'. Take
> this idea one step further and Sendmail and Procmail become 'multi-root aware'.

Except that SYSTEM is not "root".  Depending on what capabilities those
programs actually expect from "root" it may or may not have them.  And I
wish you'd stop talking about "multi-root", there is no such thing and
never will be, since there is no "root" at all.

> I created this library to do exacly that. On startup it assumes the root user id is
> '18' (SYSTEM) and the root group id is '544' (Administrators). It overrides the
> original getuid(), getgid(), etc. functions to return '0' if the actual uid/gid are
> '18' or '544'.
>
> The library makes its program 'multi-root aware' by checking if the non-SYSTEM user
> is a member of the 'Administrators' group and if so, simply replacing *its* uid and
> gid to be '0'. This totally satisfies Sendmail and Procmail.

So if I'm a member of the administrators group those programs will use
administrative rights while delivering mail to my inbox even though they
don't need to?  That doesn't sound desirable to me in any way.

> More importantly: I didn't have to change a single line in their source code (which
> would have been an awful lot), because the library is doing the swapping of
> uids/gids in the background.

As much as I had to patch it up in a time long ago I'd rather have
sendmail die as it's way past its "best-before-use date", but then I
wasn't planning on using it anyway.

> To use this library, put '#include <suexec.h>' and '-lsuexec' at a strategic
> location in your source code and Makefile. To make your program 'multi-root' aware
> and even do suid and/or sugid, place a call to 'suexec(argv[0])' in your 'main'
> function and set the suid and/or sgid bits on the resulting binary.
>
> http://cygwin.boland.nl/x86/release/libsuexec/

This library doesn't do anything su-like or exec, so I think it is misnamed.

> All GTG's are welcome...

At the very least you're missing a proper license.  But for the moment I
think you'd better patch that into sendmail and procmail gnulib-style.


Regards,
Achim.
-- 
+<[Q+ Matrix-12 WAVE#46+305 Neuron microQkb Andromeda XTk Blofeld]>+

SD adaptations for KORG EX-800 and Poly-800MkII V0.9:
http://Synth.Stromeko.net/Downloads.html#KorgSDada


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