# from David Golden
# on Monday 22 September 2008 19:56:
>On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 6:23 PM, Eric Wilhelm wrote:
>> Yes. Would someone please explain to me how this issue is not
>> already made a mostly non-issue by having a proper umask and running
>> CPAN as non-root?
>
>Someone in the thread (sorry, forget who and I'm not going to search
>for it) ...
Yeah, that was me. Hi.
>gave the example that access to Makefile.PL allows arbitrary
>additions to the Makefile install target that a non-root user might
>well run with "sudo make install" -- thus a Makefile.PL compromise
>could be used to execute arbitrary code as root.
Iff your umask is not 022 and iff you have someone on your box and iff
you are installing one of these handful of dists with this issue and
iff you are using 'sudo make install', then yes.
Having a proper umask (the default of 022 on every box I've ever seen)
means that these world-writable files don't exist. Right? I'm not
imagining things? Are there unicorns in my computer?
>Nevertheless, stopping archive extraction from creating world-readable
>files is probably a good idea.
Sure. Not a three-alarm fire though. We don't need fifteen mailing
lists to handle some burnt toast. I think a few patches would cover
it.
--Eric
--
"It is a mistake to allow any mechanical object to realize that you are
in a hurry."
--Ralph's Observation
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