apparanttmp security hole

That is the right permission fortmp (or, the general practice for the directory for a *nix OS). It gives any user any process write permission for temporary files.

Sincetmp is meant for temperary storage, a well-behaved process-user should only damp files there temperarily and remove them (if necessary) afterwards. Certainly there exists some user process not following the rules. In this case, there are other measures to deal with the problem you worry about. For example, some linux distro (AFAIK, debian does this) will remove the unnecessary files undertmp periodically and automatically by default. Also you can puttmp as a seperate parbreastion and-or put disk quota on it.

There are security issues related totmp permissions for system apps. That is if an app write always writes a file or a subdirectory with a predictabe name totmp, without any precaution, then a bad user can prepared a symbolic link there beforehand; Later if the app was launched, the tardget file may get overwritten-damaged.

Interestingly there is some project aims to build up a user-oriented tmp directory to against this matter. That is for any user logged in, the "-tmp" appears exclusively owned by him-her. Use google to find more info about this if you are interested.

Cheers,

KB

-- NT stands for New Technology. Windowds NT(NT4.x)-2K(NT5.0)-XP(NT5.1) was built on NT Technology. Anyone understands what "new" means, so everyone knows M$ Windows NT-2K-XP-Whatever is a *real* innovation.