savannah: cons.saver lacking privileges

[slavazanko]

Original: ​http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?13730

Submitted by:	Oswald Buddenhagen <ossi>	Submitted on:	Mon 11 Jul 2005 04:35:25 PM UTC
Category:	Subshell	Severity:	3 - Normal
Status:	None Privacy:	Public
Assigned to:	None	Open/Closed:	Open
Release:	current (CVS or snapshot)	Operating System:	GNU/Linux

Discussion:

Mon 11 Jul 2005 04:35:25 PM UTC, original submission:

this has been discussed to death already, but i've seen no viable 
solution so far, only hack suggestions and general paranoia.
the problem is, that "classical" 'configure && make && su -c make 
install' installations from upstream source have a non-working 
cons.saver, because it lacks access to /dev/vcsa?.
the preferred solution is having a vcsa group which /dev/vcsa? 
belong to and to which cons.saver is set-gid. however, there is no 
portable way across linux distros to accomplish this.
the pragmatic solution is just having cons.saver set-uid root and 
leaving potentially safer variants to distro-specific packages, 
like many other applications in the same situation do. after a 
security audit of the really small cons.saver source this variant 
should be perfectly applicable.