I had a look through some of the upstream releases of PAM between 0.79 and 0.99. unix_chkpwd stopped being installed setuid root in PAM 0.99.1.0 (released 27 September 2005). Although unremarked upon in the ChangeLog file, this corresponds with the adoption of the automake build system.
Since unix_chkpwd has no longer been installed setuid for the best part of two years, either other distributions is sticking with the old version of PAM and nobody noticed, or distributors are now expected to change the permissions of the file themselves. -- Sam Morris http://robots.org.uk/ PGP key id 1024D/5EA01078 3412 EA18 1277 354B 991B C869 B219 7FDB 5EA0 1078
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