Setuid permission

[Krishnan Viswanathan]

Some applications files (binaries and scripts) on my system have setuid bit for owner and group. These belong to freight management and other apps.
(i.e these files are not owned by root).

Will this still mean a security threat if these are not owned by root but have setuid bit set?

thanks

[Rodney Hills · Accepted solution]

Generally no, but their could be indirect threats.

If for instance the application has a night process that is launched by root's cron and someone got write access to the text file that has the process that cron launches, then they could in effect become root and open up more holes in your system.

-- Rod Hills

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi:

They could still be a security threat if these users/groups have access to restricted directories trees but this could also be a perfectly legitimate use of setuid/setgid; there is just no enough data posted to make that call. You will need to dig deeper. One method is to remove those permission bits and see if users complain; the bad news is that you could kill critical processes.

Regards, Clay