Re: autoconf potential bug...

[Ben Pfaff]

Shaun Colley <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> Maybe this is well-known, but when "configure" scripts
> made with autoconf are writing to temp files, they
> sometimes don't check if the file is a symlink (or so
> it seemed to me), so doesn't this present itself as a
> security vulnerability?
>
> As an example, I created a symlink called
> 'config.cache' in the directory of the package I was
> installing, and linked it to /etc/bleh.  [...]

Why would an attacker have permission to write into your
directory?  Temporary file vulnerabilities generally involve
shared directories, like /tmp, not private directories.
-- 
Ben Pfaff 
email: address@hidden
web: http://benpfaff.org