Re: ~/.hosts patch

On Jun 21, 2006, at 01:54 , Mike Jakubik wrote:

> Brooks Davis wrote:
>> On Wed, Jun 21, 2006 at 12:54:32AM -0400, Mike Jakubik wrote:
>>
>>> Justin Hibbits wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hey folks, got an interesting patch.  This adds a ~/.hosts file  
>>>> (personal version of /etc/hosts).  It was written against 6- 
>>>> STABLE about a week before 6.1 was released, and has been  
>>>> sitting collecting dust for the last month and a half.   
>>>> Currently it augments /etc/hosts instead of replacing it or  
>>>> prepending it.  Any comments?  One suggestion that was made was  
>>>> to make it an nss module so that it could be controlled by the  
>>>> admin.  It probably could use some cleanup as well, just putting  
>>>> it out here for proof of concept for now, and some direction.
>>>>
>>> Just what exactly is the point of having a user specified hosts  
>>> file? Seems like a bad idea to me, in terms of security.
>>>
>>
>> It's useful for cases where you want to add shortcuts to hosts as  
>> a user
>> or do interesting ssh port forwarding tricks in some weird cases  
>> where
>> you must connect to localhost:port as remotehost:port due to
>> client/server protocol bugs.
>>
>> This patch appears to only support ~/.hosts for non-suid binaries  
>> which
>> is the only real security issue.  Any admin relying on host to IP
>> mapping for security for ordinary users is an idiot so that case  
>> isn't
>> worth worrying about.  Doing this as a separate nss module probably
>> makes sense, but I personally like the feature.
>>
>
> Of course relying on /etc/hosts entries for security alone is  
> indeed not a good idea, however an Admin may choose to resolve and  
> therefore route specified hostnames via /etc/hosts. The user should  
> not be able to overwrite these, if this behavior is true, then it  
> seems like a reasonable change to me, otherwise it not only seems  
> to be a security problem, but also a breach of POLA.
>

In the next couple weeks, when I get some time, I will make it a NSS  
module, so that it can be controlled by the admin.

- Justin