URGENT: REDHAT 6.1 STORES SAMBA PRIVATE FILES IN /etc

[Jeremy Allison]

Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> 
> dear redhat,
> 
> i examined a friend's system today, to help him configure it.  assuming
> that he just "installed" from scratch the samba package, it appears that
> you have provided a default smb.conf file for redhat 6.1 that puts samba
> private configuration files in /etc.  the suggested options, for example
> show "smbpasswd file = /etc/smbpasswd".
> 
> this is REALLY bad.
> 
> 1) you CANNOT put smbpasswd in /etc.
> 
> 2) you CANNOT put private files DOMAIN.TRUST_ACCOUNT.mac in /etc.
> 
> i know that these require root access, however if your users start to
> assume that just because these files are in /etc, they are equivalent to
> /etc/passwd, they may decide to make these world-readable, and as a result
> they will compromise the security of the box, and potentially the security
> of remote nt-compatible boxes too (including other samba servers) because
> these files contain CLEAR_TEXT EQUIVALENT PASSWORDS.

Hang on a sec. Luke. They can do this so long as these
files are read only by root. Only stupid people will
change these files to world readable. Stupid people
shouldn't be admining systems :-).

I agree it would be safer to have a /etc/samba-private
directory set root only, but they do not ship the system
as insecure by default (ie. they *can* put root read
only files in /etc, and it *is* safe to do so).

Jeremy.

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