[ILUG] OT slight security flaw?

[Dave Airlie]

Reminds me of a time I used to work on VAX/VMS, and some ppl didn't trust
me with the SYSTEM a/c (I wonder why? :-), anyway they gave me an a/c for
backing up the system, but they gave the a/c the privildege level to
change any file on the system, so I just changed the file with all the
privs in it to give my a/c all privs, and went about my job :-), they had
to give me system later anyways, but I always laugh when I think about how
much troubles ACLs and all that crap is for an admin to do properly, 

Dave.



On Tue, 21 Mar 2000, Aaron McDaid wrote:

> Alan wrote:
> > Admin can take ownership of the file and regain access that
> > way, but the owner of the file will now be admin and this 
> > change of ownership can be noted by the user
> Kenn wrote:
> > Say I'm administrator on an NT box.  I could, in theory,
> > manipulate the on-disk data for a file to change the owner
> > to whoever I want
> 
> It's not even that hard. I remember seeing a tool on
> some warez site that simply made the API call for taking
> ownership and simply passed a different argument for the
> user name and it worked fine! No straight manipulation of data
> on the disk. Obviously you had to be root in the first place
> Just because Explorer.exe doesn't show a "Give Ownership" as
> well as "Take Ownership" button doesn't mean it's not allowed.
> 
> This is a kinda "security by obscurity"!. Many sysadmins of NT
> boxes won't have a clue it's that easy
> 
> 

-- 
------------ David Airlie, David.Airlie at ul.ie,airlied at skynet --------
Telecommunications Research Centre, ECE Dept, University of Limerick \
http://www.csn.ul.ie/~airlied	-- Telecommunications Researcher      \
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