Using UUCP under a BBS system???

Brad Morrison morrison at ficc.uu.net
Fri Feb 23 01:46:11 AEST 1990


>>In article <1990Feb13.214855.4265 at ddsw1.MCS.COM> karl at mcs.MCS.COM (Karl Denninger) posed the problem of the shell escapes from things, especially vi.

Then, in article <.OV1S=Axds13 at ficc.uu.net>, I proposed a wrapper around
the real shell to exclude restricted users.

In article <1990Feb20.202554.19826 at ddsw1.MCS.COM> karl at mcs.MCS.COM (Karl Denninger) writes:

>But what if the user finds out the real shell's name?

Touche; I hadn't thought about this...Conor P. Cahill also pointed this
out, and I'm sure that more people have thought of it.

>Security by obscurity is not security; it's hiding things.  And hidden
>things aren't locked, they're simply hidden.  Of course, since they are only
>hidden, they can also be found.

So hiding it is out.  I think that the problem isn't hacking the shell,
though; of all the tools mentioned as permitting shell escapes, the only
real offender is 'vi'.  All of the others are bad only because they can
chain to vi and get a configurable shell escape via ":set shell=/bin/sh".

But you don't want to exclude 'vi', I don't think.  What about replacing
it, instead of replacing the shell?
-- 
Brad Morrison                (713) 274-5449 |   "OK.  Come back tomorrow.
Ferranti International Controls Corporation |    Bring two apples and
uunet!ficc!morrison    morrison at ficc.uu.net |    a hammer."



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