Subject: execute permissions in /etc/init.d

From: Al Youngwerth <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 1996 13:28:31 -0600

Is there a good reason why all the start stop functions in /etc/init.d are executable by anybody by default. It seems to me that this allows your average user to stop an important system service. Anyone have comments?

Al Youngwerth
[email-masked]

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From: Christian Hudon <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 1996 20:24:13 -0700 (PDT)

On Fri, 13 Sep 1996, Al Youngwerth wrote:

> Is there a good reason why all the start stop functions in /etc/init.d
> are executable by anybody by default. It seems to me that this allows
> your average user to stop an important system service. Anyone have
> comments? 

No it doesn't. Normal (i.e. non-root) users can only kill processes that
they own... which just about means "processes that they have started." So
/etc/init.d being executable by world is not a problem at all.

Try stopping one of these services (as a non-root user)... you'll see.

   Christian

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From: Warwick HARVEY <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 1996 11:50:47 +1000

> Is there a good reason why all the start stop functions in /etc/init.d =
> are executable by anybody by default. It seems to me that this allows =
> your average user to stop an important system service. Anyone have =
> comments?

Why does it allow your average user to stop an important system service?

If a user runs the scripts, the scripts are executed with the *user*'s
permissions.  Since the user has no authority to (for example) send signals
to a daemon process they don't own, there is no damage they can do.  There's
no difference from the user running the commands in the script manually.
Thus there is no harm in allowing execution by anybody.

				Warwick

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Warwick Harvey                                    email: [email-masked]
Department of Computer Science                        phone: +61-3-9287-9171
University of Melbourne                                 fax: +61-3-9348-1184
Parkville, Victoria, AUSTRALIA 3052     web: http://www.cs.mu.OZ.AU/~warwick