Unexpected NFS Effects

Guy Harris guy at auspex.auspex.com
Thu Jun 29 06:36:27 AEST 1989


>So that's how it is, I'm sure. The question now is "Why?". I can't think
>of any reason why you couldn't pass a "read for execution" request distinct
>from a "read as data" request.

Even if you could, it wouldn't provide real security - just write
user-level NFS client code (not too painful) that "reads" a file by
using "read for execution" requests.

In other words, don't assume packets coming into your server are being
generated by a "trusted" source, unless you have some way of verifying
that.  I know of another remote file system that, as far as I can tell,
trusts requests to some degree, and would let me open a file for
reading and then make "write" requests to it, simply by generating the
messages myself rather than going through the kernel code....



More information about the Comp.unix.wizards mailing list