details on uasetx and uasig?

[Prentiss Riddle]

In article <1081 at unisec.usi.com>, dpw at unisec.usi.com (Darryl P. Wagoner) writes:
> On the problem of UA, one solution maybe a program that will check out
> what the user is passing to uasetx & uasig and reject or accept it base 
> upon the user, the group that user, and where he is logged in.  Uasig
> may not be a problem, but it is a setuid program and should be checked
> out.  At some point I may write this program but it will be a while.

This sounds like a workable approach.  I'm told that this has been done
at Rochester Institute of Technology but I haven't succeeded in
contacting the person who supposedly did it, so it may need to be done
over again. 

To make the problem a little bit more concrete, does anyone out there
know about the precise roles played by uasetx and uasig?  I take it
from several people's comments that uasetx is the real "villain" here,
being the program that gives the UA arbitrary root privileges.  So what
does uasig do?  Better yet, does anyone have specific information about
the interface to uasetx and uasig -- what arguments they expect, etc.?
Presumably a black-box approach could be used to deduce the answers to
these questions, but it would be better not to have to play guessing
games. 

--- Prentiss Riddle ("Aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada.")
--- Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer.
--- riddle at woton.UUCP  {ihnp4,harvard}!ut-sally!im4u!woton!riddle