snow writes:

...

...

Couple of things you can do: 2. Install a more secure "fingerd" such that it only allows "finger `userid@node.domain`" instead of "finger `@node.domain`".

cfingerd can be gotten from:

cfingerd is not a safe program. It must run as root, and has some big problems. Date: Wed, 18 Sep 1996 18:34:43 +0200 (MET DST) From: Janos Farkas <chexum@shadow.banki.hu> To: Administrador da Rede <admrede@opensite.com.br> cc: linux-security@tarsier.cv.nrao.edu Subject: Re: Finger Doubt Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.95.960918181033.2523A-100000@shadow.banki.hu> Howdy people! On Tue, 17 Sep 1996, Administrador da Rede wrote:

I use the newest version of cfinger, setted to not allow general finger, just specific ones. Does anyone knows how this person did that ? I hope I can find out, otherwise, bye bye finger service.

Badly. I have sent the author a letter, but never got any reply back (it's 3 months later now!), so I just take the opportunity to warn the public against its use. Excerpts from the source (1.2.3, older versions have been a bit more directly broken, now it has root privs only at the moments it shouldn't have.) "This daemon must be run as root!" [And unfortunately, does..] ... unlink ("/tmp/fslist"); ... sprintf(st, "%s | tail +2 >> /tmp/fslist", prog_config.finger_program); ... system(st); A similarly terrible one some lines later: system("cat /tmp/fslist | sort > /tmp/fslist.sort"); As it stands, it can allow any local user to destroy any file on the system, including partition tables on disks. Please someone correct me if I am wrong, I tried this with cfingerd-1.2.2 and it allowed me to do bad things. I was a bit disappointed by the lack of any reply from the author, so I think I am now justified to tell that if anyone installed cfingerd (about 1.1 or later) on his system, disable it IMMEDIATELY, until at least the author clarifies this bug in a new version. The current version is BAD. However if you just need a finger daemon, you may take a look at xfingerd, at ftp://ftp.banki.hu:/pub/xfingerd/xfingerd-0.1.tar.gz which is the one I wrote when I got desperate about cfingerd. (If you take a look at its date stamp, you can see that cfingerd is long broken..) I too can't garantee that it's good for you, but it at least doesn't require to be run as root, which is why I started being against cfingerd. I hope this note finds everyone concerned. Janos -- steve@miranova.com baur Unsolicited commercial e-mail will be billed at $250/message. Real men aren't afraid to use chains on icy roads.