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Why do set-uid programs not work?

April 26, 2017Programs set-uid

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Why do set-uid programs not work?

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On 20th Apr 1998 jleffler@visa.com (Leffler, Jonathan) wrote:- The reason why SUID doesn’t work has been explained in the long distant past on this group, but we’re talking about 3 years ago, or maybe more. Anyway, under 5.x and earlier Informix systems, the application forked and execed an engine process. The engine was SUID root, SGID informix, and this effectively overrode the SUID-ness of the application. The real UID is inherited by the engine, and the effective UID was root; the real GID is inherited, and the effective GID was informix. So, when the engine looked to see who it was working for, it only knew about the real UID and GID and was not aware that the application was ever running set-anything.