What to do about nologin(8)?

[John Baldwin]

On Monday 23 February 2004 02:58 pm, Doug Rabson wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-02-23 at 17:45, Colin Percival wrote:
> >    As anyone who reads cvs-all (or Mark Johnston's wonderful
> > summaries thereof) will know, I recently added logging into
> > nologin(8): Instead of simply printing an error message, it
> > now (via syslog) records the refused login attempt.
> >    For security reasons, nologin(8) must be statically linked;
> > as a result, adding logging has increased the binary size by
> > slightly over 100K (on i386).  For historical reasons (which
> > is to say, "nobody seems to know why"), nologin is located in
> > /sbin, which means that this has a non-trivial effect upon
> > the space used on the root partition.  Some people are unhappy
> > about this.
> >    I can see a number of possible options; I'd like to hear
> > opinions on which would be the best.
>
> How about:
>
> 7: Use 'system("logger ...") to log the failed login?

Wouldn't that be subject to the same LD_LIBRARY_PATH concerns since logger is 
dynamically linked and you could trojan it's libc?

-- 
John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>  <><  http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve"  =  http://www.FreeBSD.org