Subject: Re: Passing credentials as ancillary data
To: Ronald Khoo <ronald@demon.net>
From: Jason Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>
List: tech-kern
Date: 01/07/1998 18:52:59
On Thu, 8 Jan 1998 02:19:32 +0000
Ronald Khoo <ronald@demon.net> wrote:
> Presumably it's for the same security/audit model reasons that
> SecureWare C3 (e.g. SCO unix) implements the setluid() call.
> It's supposed to be an audit identifier that *cannot* under any
> circumstances be hidden. The UID and EUID indicate whose
> permissions are being used to authenticate whether or not something
> may be done. The login name indicates who actually initiated
> the function, and should be preserved through inheritance
> regardless of how many setuid-whoever programs or set*uid() calls
> are made.
...not really... I mean, the login name can be changed with setlogin().
> I'm guessing of course -- I'm no security weenie -- but there
> seems little point in implementing a tiny part of an audit
> infrastructure that we don't have, except for binary compatibility,
> where we call always fill in the bsdos_ucred structure with the
> constant string "root" :-)
Oh, it's easy to get that info, from the process's session... but the
point is that it's not really part of the process's _credentials_.
Jason R. Thorpe thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
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