Subject: Bug#4190: serious security hole in libc (resolver)

From: David Engel <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Sep 1996 14:07:12 -0500 (CDT)

On Thu, 29 Aug 1996, Marek Michalkiewicz wrote:
> David Engel wrote:
> > About the best I can do, without further guidance, is make libc not
> > echo the problem lines to stderr.  Is that acceptable?
> 
> I'm not sure.  Someone could still read special files as root
> (they would not see the contents, but merely reading them might
> sometimes cause troubles too, if reading changes the state of
> the device - as is the case with tapes, for example).
> 
> My suggestion (not tested, but it is rather simple) - replace
> all occurrences of getenv() in the resolver with safe_getenv(),
> implemented like this:
> ...

OK.  Seeing that GNU libc, aka Linux libc 6.x, does not support the
environment variables, does anyone object to me just removing them
altogether?

David
---
David Engel                        Optical Data Systems, Inc.
[email-masked]                      1101 E. Arapaho Road
(214) 234-6400                     Richardson, TX  75081