cross-platform virus

[John]

Pete Ryland wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 10, 2006 at 08:27:41 +0800, John wrote:
> 
>>It would be nice if there were no way for stuff in ~, /tmp and /var/tmp 
>>to escalate _by any means_ to root.
> 
> 
> If the sudoers entry was changed to something like:
> 
> Cmnd_Alias ALLPROGRAMS = /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/local/bin, \
>                          /usr/local/sbin, /usr/bin/X11, /usr/games
> 
> %admin ALL=(ALL) ALLPROGRAMS
> 
> then it would alleviate the problem of running code under sudo that could be
> written by a bad non-root process.
> 
> Pete
> 

I'm not sure that helps a lot...

What I have in mind is a means whereby a program loaded from an untrused 
location cannot, by any means, run any program from any location such 
that the program has elevated privilege.

EG A program in ~/bin cannot run fdisk with root privileges, with or 
without su, sudo or runas.

OS/VS (a family of IBM operating systems) implemented this over 30 years 
ago, it's not a new idea.

A process _may_ be privileged only if it and all its parents are loaded 
from trusted locations, typically all the standard bin (and lib?) 
directories.