5177610 2000-06-08  23:03  /76 rader/ Postmaster
Mottagare: Bugtraq (import) <11223>
Ärende: Re: bind running as root in Mandrake 7.0
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Approved-By: aleph1@SECURITYFOCUS.COM
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Date:         Thu, 8 Jun 2000 11:40:25 -0700
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From: Elias Levy <aleph1@SECURITYFOCUS.COM>
To: BUGTRAQ@SECURITYFOCUS.COM
In-Reply-To:  <20000604173901.A30077@halfpricehosting.com>

This is a summary of the last responses in this thread. I am killing
this thread here.

Jim Knoble <jmknoble@pint-stowp.cx>:

Those really interested in a secure DNS server ought to forget trying           to secure BIND and use D. J. Bernstein's dnscache package instead:

 http://cr.yp.to/dnscache.html

Its "regular" DNS server, tinydns, runs as a non-root user in
chrooted environment by default.  Read the website for more info
about security, dnscache, and BIND.

Thomas Novin <thnov@thalamus.se>:

>Debian Slink and Potato (frozen) both install BIND 8.2.2R5 as root.

Slackware also as long as I can remeber. Same goes for the latest
version, 7.0-current.

"Andrew L . Davis" <adavis@THREKSTUN.NET>:

> Debian Slink and Potato (frozen) both install BIND 8.2.2R5 as root.

There was a long standing discussion on this which basically boils
down to the fact that if you obtain your address dynamically or have
dynamic interfaces (some form of PPP or anything on PCMCIA) you have
to run it as root in order for bind to use these interfaces.

bind does not bind 0.0.0.0:53. It for one or another reason binds
every interface separately. Hence if an interface is not available at
bind start time and bind does not run as root the interfaces are not
rebound.

So running as non-root will not work in some cases. They may be
covered in any of the listed distros but this means making bind, all
dhcp-clients, pcmcia, ppp, ad naseum depend on each other and mess
with each other's init scripts.  For now I do not know of a distro
that does this.

Nicolas MONNET <nico@MONNET.TO>:

Red Hat 6.0 runs named as root.root.
Red Hat 6.2 runs named as named.named

Andreas Hasenack <andreas@conectiva.com.br>:

That fix also doesn't take into consideration that named can dump
some statistics files, such as named.memstat, named.stats and
named_dump.db.  named follows symlinks, and therefore those files
shouldn't be dumped in a world writable directory such as /var/tmp
(although we are now running as an unprivileged user). One shoule
create another directory, give the right permissions to it and let
named dump those files there.

For example, the following lines in named.conf's options section:
  dump-file "/var/named/dump/named_dump.db";
  statistics-file "/var/named/dump/named.stats";
  memstatistics-file "/var/named/dump/named.memstats"; And make that
directory so that the "named" user can create files there.

--
Elias Levy
SecurityFocus.com
http://www.securityfocus.com/
Si vis pacem, para bellum
(5177610) ------------------------------------------(Ombruten)