On Sat, 27 Sep 1997 13:21:55 -0400 (EDT),
fwf27775(_at_)pegasus(_dot_)cc(_dot_)ucf(_dot_)edu (Fritz W Feuerbacher) wrote:
I am interested in learning about general security issues related to
using procmail. I want to know what can happen.
This probably still isn't the answer you were looking for, but
ANYthing can happen. ;^)
If you can formulate your question a bit more specifically (along the
lines Philip suggested, and choose an appropriate Subject: header)
there could be more to say about this.
If you are asking about known security holes, then yes, Procmail IS a
known security hole, if you're the paranoid type. If you trust your
users to only do sensible things in their Procmail scripts, though,
it's not such a bad deal.
Examples: If you have a dedicated mail host which you don't allow
logins to, allowing users to run Procmail on that might be a bad idea.
You could of course ask them to be nice, and/or hope they don't find
out how they can use Procmail to get a shell on that host (my
University currently does this, apparently), but that might not be
acceptable if security is important at your site.
And then there's the ever-fascinating mail loop scenario. Creating
mail loops is +extremely+ easy. It doesn't even have to be done on
purpose to knock out your mail host.
Are these the sorts of things you had in mind?
/* era */
Procmail 3.11pre7 allegedly has an experimental compile-time switch
which lets you restrict the environment in which your users'
.procmailrc:s run.
--
Paparazzi of the Net: No matter what you do to protect your privacy,
they'll hunt you down and spam you. <http://www.iki.fi/~era/spam/>