MOAB advisories

[Bill Moran]

Alexander Leidinger <Alexander at Leidinger.net> wrote:
>
> Quoting Bill Moran <wmoran at collaborativefusion.com> (Sun, 14 Jan 2007 10:15:15 -0500):
> 
> > "Kobajashi Zaghi" <kobajashi at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > 
> > > I would like to know, that these following "vulnerabilities" does
> > > affect FreeBSD's reliability? If the answer is "yes", what version of
> > > FreeBSD affected, when will be fixed, etc.
> > > 
> > > http://projects.info-pull.com/moab/MOAB-12-01-2007.html
> > > http://projects.info-pull.com/moab/MOAB-10-01-2007.html
> > 
> > These folks are establishing themselves as careless, alarmist, and
> > uneducated when it comes to kernel bugs.
> > 
> > In FreeBSD, the above mentioned flaws can, indeed, cause a kernel panic.
> > However, this is intended behaviour when a corrupt filesystem is
> > encountered.  It protects the system from serious damage that could
> > result from trying to work with the corrupt filesystem.
> > 
> > The difference, that the info-pull folks seem to be too stupid to
> > understand, is that FreeBSD does not allow mounting of filesystems
> > by anyone other than root.
> 
> Except root did set the sysctl to allow this, or started a HAL daemon
> which mounts stuff for the desktop user, or uses amd to mount stuff.

All decisions made by root.

It's always possible, on any system, for an administrative user to set up
a configuration that is insecure or unsafe, that doesn't mean that it's
a flaw in the system.  Quite the contrary, any system that attempts to
limit an administrator's power to keep things secure becomes inflexible,
and nearly useless.

-Bill