On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 4:55 PM, Warren Young <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>> There have been remotely exploitable vulnerabilities where an arbitrary file 
>> could be read
>
> CVEs, please?
>
> I’m aware of vulnerabilities that allow a remote read of arbitrary files that 
> are readable by the exploited process’s user, but for such an exploit to work 
> on /etc/shadow, the process has to be running as root.
>
> Most such vulns are against Apache, PHP, etc, which do not run as root.

Those are common.  Combine them with anything called a 'local
privilege escalation' vulnerability and you've got a remote root
exploit.  And people will know how to combine them.

> One of the biggest reasons for the mass exodus from Sendmail to 
> qmail/exim/postfix/etc was to get away from a monolithic program that had to 
> run as root to do its work.

Except that sendmail was fixed.  And when the milter interface was
added it became even less monolithic.

>> Further, lists of usernames and passwords have market value.
>
> Of course.  But that’s a different thing than we were discussing.

Not exactly - it just becomes a question of whether the complexity
requirements imposed by the installer are really worth much against
the pre-hashed lists that would be used to match up the shadow
contents.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    [email protected]
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