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Aucbvax.3034 fa.unix-wizards utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!unix-wizards Wed Sep 9 22:21:20 1981

>From mhtsa!chico!esquire!nrh@Berkeley Wed Sep 9 22:15:40 1981 A recent netnews item mentioned that Berkeley's vmunix turned off the setuid bit on a file when that file was modified. The item suggested that this solved a security problem with v7 mail.

I sent a reply to this item, but it seems to have gotten lost. Try again.....

One thing I learned from v6 unix: An OS that does:

1. What you tell it to do 2. \ONLY/ what you tell it to do

is orders of magnitude more usable than one which tries to protect you from yourself. In my (limited) experience, the ones that try to protect you mostly manage to protect you from doing any useful work. Turning off setuid when the ownership is changed by a non-su is necessarily in the kernal.

Turning off setuid when the file is modified is "protecting the programmer from his own foolishness", and could be done in a library routine, rather than in the kernal.

One last bit of sour grapes: the message about Berkeley's mod said that the kernal change is "simple". Pfui. It doesn't matter how simple the mod is if it doesn't belong in the kernal.

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