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Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2011 09:05:39 -0500
From: Steve Grubb <sgrubb@...hat.com>
To: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Cc: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>, Florian Zumbiehl <florz@...rz.de>,
        "Steven M. Christey" <coley@...us.mitre.org>,
        Stefan Fritsch <sf@...itsch.de>, Jan Kaluza <jkaluza@...hat.com>,
        Paul Martin <pm@...ian.org>, Petr Uzel <petr.uzel@...e.cz>,
        Thomas Biege <thomas@...e.de>, Jan Lieskovsky <jlieskov@...hat.com>
Subject: Re: CVE Request -- logrotate -- nine issues

On Friday, March 04, 2011 12:52:14 pm Solar Designer wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 04, 2011 at 12:05:02PM -0500, Steven M. Christey wrote:
> > If there's a common usage scenario that doesn't stem from blatant
> > administrator negligence, then a CVE is probably still appropriate.
> > ("blatant admin negligence" might be, say, if an admin arbitrarily makes
> > a script setuid, or modifies the perms for an executable or config file
> > to be world-writable.)
> 
> I think that "chmod 777 /var/log" is "blatant admin negligence".  As to,
> say, "chown nginx /var/log/nginx", it could be negligence or it could be
> lack of familiarity with the risks involved.  So I am willing to admit
> that it's not necessarily negligence that turns those issues into
> vulnerabilities on specific systems.
> 
> > We will sometimes write the CVE description more as an "adminisrator
> > practice" than as "fault of the software."
> 
> Oh, this is something I did not realize.  A lot of people assume that
> CVEs "blame" the software and its authors for having made an error.
> 
> It felt wrong, say, to blame a text editor for being unsafe to use on
> files in untrusted directories when such unsafety was the typical and
> expected situation for text editors in general.

So, where does that leave us for things like this? :

http://reverse.lostrealm.com/protect/ldd.html
http://www.catonmat.net/blog/ldd-arbitrary-code-execution/

-Steve

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