Re: overwrite any file with updatedb

[Sascha Runschke <decker@matrix.ping.de>]

On Tue, Mar 03, 1998 at 01:57:33PM -0500, Bryan Andregg wrote:

> >That's a solution?  Sounds like Russian Roulette.  It narrows the
> >window if danger tremendously, but doesn't eliminate it.  There must
> >be a better answer.
> 
> The solution is not to patch to make harder to predict file names but to 
> create those files with mkstemp instead of mktemp. Sorry I wasn't more clear 
> in the first place.

In my humble opinion *any* temporary file created with root-privileges
should reside in a special tmp directory like /var/adm/tmp or something
equal. This would deny *any* symlink-attacks, no matter how poor the
design of the program used is. You cannot rely on something which is not
proven to be used by everbody. So mktemp and mkstemp, etc.  should
go and make their files in the desired directory if called by uid or euid
0.

just my $.02
	Sascha 

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