openSUSE Security December 2004

security@lists.opensuse.org

90 participants
64 discussions

Wine and ISDN
by Nihad Mujkanovic 16 Jan '05

16 Jan '05

NOW I AM REALLY PISSED OFF! At first I wanted to title this "DOS attack performed by SuSE" or "Sabotage performed by SuSE", but I managed it to cool down a bit, so I hopefully don't hit the wrong guy(s), but someone's got to be blamed and flamed, since this is a neverending story. I don't know if it's the team working on WINE or SuSE team compiling the packages for the distro, I assume it's both of them at the end. What they allow themselves is a pure sabotage and because it repeats in several distributions (I can remember at least the last 4-5) I can't believe that is an act of ignorance or a minor failure: I have never in my life had anything to do with ISDN and I don't have any hardware for this shit and I am even less interested in getting it, but SuSE is FORCING me to install ISDN packages, nevertheless. I ALWAYS deselect this crap and set it to "tabu", but the first time the system s allowed to automatically install a packet I happen to need (e.g. bttv in my case), it IGNORES any settings from installation time and installs all things I do not need: capi4linux, a bunch of isdn packages, formerly even "gnokii". Have you ever noticed that even if you deselect capi4linux, there are still packages required by it? Story background: I use wine sometimes and want it in my computer. Now, some brainless idiot(s) have set the package requirements so that you can't dodge, you'll get shot down anyway. Do they have something against smoothly running systems? Mine was OK, then I let the system automatically install packages needed for my TV card, and what happens? My computer hangs while trying to unload ISDN modules on reboot, and can't reboot any more!!! The only thing that helped was he reset button. After reboot, I saw there was a new entry in runlevel editor - you guess - "ISDN" and it was ON!!! I'm lucky this happened in my test machine and not in one of the servers I have running SuSE, but I am still VERY pissed off. What now? I don't believe that SuSE people are a bunch of idiots, because they have done many good things and hopefully will keep on doing them further. I don't believe it HAS to be this way, because other distributions don't do this to me/us. I don't believe they haven't noticed this, because this repeats for years, so what remains? Nothing I can think of but pure ignorance. This is not the only one thing that made me jump over to gentoo, but this is the only one that made me write this letter already three times ago, but every time till now I cooled down and trashed the mails. Now I won't. I have payed 90 EUR for the shit and I WANT IT WORKING PROPERLY! Don't you, wouldn't you, too? regards Dr. Nihad Mujkanovic Vienna, Austria

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Will SuSE support stack smashing protection one day?
by Malte Gell 09 Jan '05

09 Jan '05

Hi there, I'm just playing a bit with IBM's SSP ( http://www.research.ibm.com/trl/projects/security/ssp/ ) and GCC 3.4.1. Since OpenBSD, Gentoo and others already ship with it, i wonder what do the SuSE security people think about SSP? Will SuSE support it in the future and if not, why? Is SSP really such an improvement as some say it is? regards Malte

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"manually" updating PHP on Suse 9.1 (to PHP 4.3.10)
by Thomas Hochstein 06 Jan '05

06 Jan '05

I've got one or two questions egarding those still missing critical PHP updates. Suse 9.1, Apache2, mod_php 1. AFAIS, in Suse 9.1, most modules can be found in /usr/lib/php/extensions. Would it be sufficient to download PHP 4.3.10 from php.net, compile and install it into a different directory (--prefix), to get rid of the bugs? AFAIS, (un)serialize() and (un)pack() are part of the PHP core. 2. To "get back" to SuSe RPMs, is it sufficient to install the Suse apache2-mod_php-4 RPM as soon as it is available? (And perhaps to manually remove the install directoty from step 1 above). The RPM should overwrite /usr/lib/apache2-prefork/libphp4.so and all other newly installed files, I presume? Thanks for all comments - even if those questions *are* a little dumb, I fear. :) -thh

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Failed attempts, block address
by MB 03 Jan '05

03 Jan '05

Hi list, Been getting a ton of attempts on my ssh/ftp connections as of late, first they started with the usual script kids trying the admin/guest/etc on the ssh connection, now i get people trying all sorts of stupid usernames with blank passwords on the ftp connection. 1. Is there a way to block an IP, either perm. or for set period of time for SSH attempts 2. Is there a simular way for VSFTP I'm sure i could block the address's manually, but i'd like it if it was automated? say for 6 attempts? Matt SuSE 9.1 --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we.

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security settings in suse vs openbsd
by Cristian Del Carlo 30 Dec '04

30 Dec '04

Hi, i install in server web and firewall suse linux professional or openbsd. I find in openbsd some security settings and security applications very useful that i don't find in suse 9.1: 1) Apache in chroot by default Is possible to have in suse the possibility to chroot apache with an option in /etc/sysconfig/apache2 like dhcp or named? Now to have apache2 in chroot i use modsecurity ( that i must compile in to the system). 2) Systrace A very useful application is systrace, with this application is possible to execute the services with the possibilty to control the system calls. Is possible to use it in suse linux? Best regards, Cristian Del Carlo

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RE: [suse-security] Will SuSE support stack smashing protection one day?
by James M. Patton 30 Dec '04

30 Dec '04

> Er, a vulnerablility that hasn't been discovered isn't a danger to anyone > and doesn't need protecting against! I'm not sure what you mean to say > here. I would sure hope that this is NOT the views of the Novell/SuSE team... > Not that many I suspect. SSP is unlikely to make a vulnerability > unexploitable, just harder to exploit. If I were penetration testing a > machine I knew to be using SSP I'd just craft my exploit accordingly. > Sometimes SSP/Stackguard/Stackshield/et al make it impossible to exploit a > vulnerability, but that is far from guaranteed. More likely the attacker > just needs to try harder. > > You appear to be under the impression that these sorts of tools offer > genuine protection. They don't. They sometimes downgrade a code execution > exploit into a denial of service (because the "protected" program will > still crash when its buffer is overflowed), but in general they just force > the attacker to work harder. But when dealing with script kiddies, any delay or difficulties you can cause very well may make the difference. In general, anything that one can do to increase the security of an information system under their control is a good thing. And any tools the vendors can provide us only helps to increase the security posture of our systems. Downgrading a local / remote compromise (or code execution exploit) to a denial of service is a great step forward. It could mean the difference of joe hacker crashing your system or having your shadow file - which would you prefer? I personally would prefer that my system be crashed than having to deal with a security incident.

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RE: [suse-security] Will SuSE support stack smashing protection one day?
by James M. Patton 30 Dec '04

30 Dec '04

> Mail interface giving you shit huh ;) Yeah... freaking windoze for mail.. ugh. > Do you say that at work? From the addy I see Military, and I > know you guys have some Windows boxes somewhere, unless they > were finally taken out. scares me when the Army uses Windows.... > Or any other team who protects. I couldn't agree with you more on that. I admin Beowulf clusters, so my exposure to windows is pretty much only for e-mail and the like. However, I am very vocal about the security (or lack thereof) of windows. Nice thing about being a contractor ;) > And lose my uptime???????? That bastard better hope he > grabs the shadow file, at least that way I have one IP > in the logs instead of 300 a second. Then I can retaliate. > What's he going to do, say he was rooting me and I attacked > him ? Well, in our environment, data loss or a root compromise would be much worse than the cluster's head node being offline for a few minutes. I'd rather reboot a downed system than have to explain to the government folks why someone in Korea or another unfriendly has their data. Downtime is much easier to explain in many environments than a system compromise. And often the data which is on a system is far more important than maintaining a 99.999999999999% uptime.

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Cyrus IMAP Backup Hints?
by Markus Feilner 28 Dec '04

28 Dec '04

Hello List, I have some questions concerning the backup of a cyrus imap server: Do you have any hints how to backup a Cyrus IMAP Server in general? I found two basic solutions, none of which seem perfect: a) stop the server, backup /var/lib/... AND THE CONFIG FILES, restart the server. b) make a snapshot of the filesystem (e.g. following the cyrus wiki) Solution b) seems a little much for a simple backup, but i don't want to stop my IMAP Server during the backup. So my questions are: Are there better solutions? There must be, hm? How long does Cyrus have to be down during backup? Do you have any experience? -- Mit freundlichen Grüßen Markus Feilner --------------------------- Bitte beachten Sie unsere neuen Adressdaten! Vielen Dank. --------------------------- Feilner IT Linux & GIS Linux Solutions, Training, Seminare und Workshops - auch Inhouse Beraiterweg 4 93047 Regensburg fon +49 941 9465243 fax +49 941 9465244 mobil + +49 170 3027092 mail mfeilner(a)feilner-it.net web http://www.feilner-it.net

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PHP Update
by Stefan.Junge＠ssi-schaefer.de 28 Dec '04

28 Dec '04

Hello, I would like to update the php package on a old SuSe 7.3 box. Because there are no further updates available I decided to download the newest version 4.3.10. I have never updated php in these constellation. Is there a reason why I should not do this or could this be a problem? Thanks for any hints Stefan

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Samba-LDAP-PAM question
by Mike Partyka 28 Dec '04

28 Dec '04

Hello, I am trying to follow IDEALx's "Samba3-LDAP PDC Howto" and am having difficulty with the PAM configuration portion of this because i am trying to install on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and SuSE does not use the pam_stack.so module so there is no catchall system-auth file to edit as the guide describes. Since there is not a system-auth file, i wonder would it be sufficient to do the necessary edit's to the /etc/pam.d/samba file? I know in some cases the /etc/pam.d/other file is used, when a specific config file for a service is not found in the /etc/pam.d directory. Can someone with a better understanding of the pam configuration, tell me which config files (lacking the system-auth file) in the /etc/pam.d directory are needed to make the overall setup work? And are the changes to these files the same as would have occured in the system-auth file? Mike Partyka Stonepath Logistics Systems Administrator (651)405-4300 Desk (651)208-5734 Cell (651)405-4342 Fax

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openSUSE Security December 2004