[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Re: Ubuntu's hal changes which are appropriate for Debian

Martin Pitt martin at piware.de
Fri Apr 20 06:50:53 UTC 2007


Hi,

Michael Biebl [2007-04-19 23:35 +0200]:
> Hm, other packages, like avahi-daemon, avahi-autoipd, gdm or
> openssh-server do also remove their system user on purge.
> 
> Imo, the only reason, why a user shouldn't be removed, is when the
> daemon creates files (like log files or spool files (as e.g. exim))
> which would then be without a proper owner.
> 
> This is not the case with hal (at least I don't know one besides the fdi
> cache file which should be removed on purge anyways).

There is another small corner case: Imagine you purge a package A
which still has a process a running with the system user (for whatever
reason). Then you install package B which creates another system user
but re-uses the uid. Then the stale process a and the new daemon b can
suddenly access each other's processes, files, etc. So there is an
(admittedly very small, but nonzero) potential for a security hole.

Martin
-- 
Martin Pitt        http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer   http://www.ubuntu.com
Debian Developer   http://www.debian.org
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-utopia-maintainers/attachments/20070420/e4e439c6/attachment.pgp


More information about the Pkg-utopia-maintainers mailing list