On Wed, Apr 04, 2001 at 09:37:52PM +0100, Ralf Koch wrote:
Hi Pascal,
I know we had the discossion some times ago. Do you know anything about actual (!) security flaws of sendmail? And if not - why should postfix be more secure? (See discussion of "secure" FTP daemons)
No, probably there aren't any actual known sendmail security problems with the most recent versions. There was a serious effort to clean up the code and it might actually be secure now. But, it is a large, complicated program with a lengthy and lousy security history. And it runs as root. These are all bad signs. There's simply no way to know when a given fix will be the last one needed, so if, as I suspect, you're insisting on hard evidence, you're not going to find it until it's too late, i.e. an exploit has been found. It has often been the case that the security history of a program has been useful in predicting the likelihood of future security problems. BIND-8 is a classic example. On the other hand, Dan Bernstein puts his money where his mouth is, offering a $500 reward to anyone who can find a vulnerability in qmail (or djbdns). To my knowledge, this has never been collected. I find this very comforting. -- David Benfell benfell@parts-unknown.org --- SuSE, qmail, ezmlm, and much much more... Hire me!