Re: tinylogin vs. busybox

[Koen Kooi <k.kooi@student.utwente.nl>]

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Michael 'Mickey' Lauer schreef:
| On Wednesday 13 February 2008 13:53:18 Koen Kooi wrote:
|> Michael 'Mickey' Lauer schreef:
|> | I just realized that we are still using tinylogin which has bugs and
|>
|> is dead.
|>
|> | Newer busybox releases contain all the functionality. Anyone know a
|> | compelling reason to keep using tinylogin as the default in
task-base? If
|> | not, I'd like to switch to busybox (after changing its defconfig) soon.
|>
|> Using busybox as login requires it being setuid root, with all the nasty
|> security implications stemming from that.
|
| http://www.busybox.net/lists/busybox/2004-May/011551.html give me the
opinion
| that this is not a problem.

If that email is true, we could dump tinylogin, but frankly, I trust
busybox as far as I can throw a piano (and toybox as far as I can throw
a 21" crt) and SUID root binaries make my skin crawl, so we must be very
carefull and do thorough tests before making this change.
The last thing we want is $bigcompany to blame OE for the exploitabilty
of their devices.

|> I don't think OE should force
|> people to only have one user ('root') on their systems, since that is
|> exactly what your proposed change would mean.
|
| I agree, but I don't see why using busybox login would limit us to
root-only.
| Care to give more details?

The way busybox worked before is that *any* busybox applet is SUID root,
which means 'vi' and 'passwd' are as well, which in practice means there
is only one user: root.

| Besides, I think using something old and dead as tinylogin with known
bugs is
| more of a security problem than setuid root busybox...

That depends on what those bugs are, I can't do more than handwaving
about one being less secure as the other without that knowledge.

regards,

Koen

- --
koen@dominion.kabel.utwente.nl will go go away in december 2007, please
use k.kooi@student.utwente.nl instead.

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