Major Security Hole In Samsung Linux Drivers

GerbilSoft writes with news of a major security hole in Samsung's proprietary Linux printer drivers. From the Ubuntu Forums: "Just to inform you about a recent post on the French Ubuntu forum about Samsung drivers (sorry, in French). [Google translation here.] It appears that Samsung unified drivers change rights on some parts of the system: After installing the drivers, applications may launch using root rights, without asking any password. What is more, you may be able to kill your system, by deleting system components, generally modifiable only by using sudo." GerbilSoft adds: "Among the programs that it sets as setuid-root are OpenOffice, xsane, and xscanimage."

Comments

Re:Flawed Design...

[morgan_greywolf]

I'm going to reply to your post backwards, but you'll see why.

Unix security if just flawed and the flaw is called "root".

There is a fix for this flaw. It's called 'groups.'

Only when the little bugger of an hotplug-manager changes the user id for the scanner device to the logged on user. Which still only gives one user access to the scanner. Have my Wife remote logged in and only one of us can use the scanner.

This is distro-dependant. On Ubuntu, scanner access is controlled by groups. Want a user to be able to scan? You add them to the scanner group. You want someone to have access to burn CDs/DVDs? You add them to the cdrom group. If the scanner device is owned by any user, and owned by the group scanner, the permissions on the scanning device are set to group read/write, and both you and your wife are in the scanner group, then you both have access to the scanner. Try it yourself. Problem solved.

BTW--with SANE, the best way to have two people access the same scanner is via the saned network sharing mechanism, which allows other systems using xsane (or other sane front-end) to access the scanner over the network without having to remote login.