security issues

[Darryl Clarke]

On 13/03/06, Lamp <lampajoo at gmail.com> wrote:
> "Karl Øie discovered that the Ubuntu 5.10 installer failed to clean
> passwords in the installer log files. Since these files were
> world-readable, any local user could see the password of the first
> user account, which has full sudo privileges by default.
>
> The updated packages remove the passwords and additionally make the
> log files readable only by root."
>
>
> Why on God's green earth was the password ever written to a file in
> the first place?!?!??  I use ubuntu because it's "easy," not expecting
> it to be ultra secure, but this is ridiculous.  To compound the
> problem the explanation given is awful... "since these files were
> world-readable" should have been, "some dumbass wrote code that wrote
> clear text passwords to disk"--the readability of the files is
> irrelevant.    I'm switching distros ASAP, there's no way I can trust
> ubuntu after this.
>
> --

That's a pretty heavy reaction.  You'd never even know of it if the
origial bug finder actually posted the critical status of properly. 
Unfortunately it hit the forums, then a bug was posted.

I read about the bug, updated, saw the fix come in, checked the files
affected and sure enough they're clean (and no longer world readable).

Also, from the timeline and information on launchpad this bug was
fixed quite rapidly, and will receive further investigation as to why
it happened.  The installer is supposed to clear those fields before
writing the log, clearly it didn't.  Oops, humans, they're crazy.

--
~ Darryl  ~ smartssa at gmail.com
~ http://darrylclarke.com