From: anthonm AT tams DOT com DOT au (Michael Anthon) Subject: RE: Feedback needed on proposed cygwin feature 4 Dec 1997 22:51:14 -0800 Message-ID: <3120D53DC9D5D011A59A00C0F016383303A323.cygnus.gnu-win32@server1> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain To: gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com On Thursday, 4 December 1997 12:31, cgf AT bbc DOT com [SMTP:cgf AT bbc DOT com] wrote: > In article <34856623 DOT C5226DBC AT twinspot DOT net>, > Tomas Fasth wrote: > >Modifying the exe file "on-the-fly" for environmental settings is not to > >recommend. Two of the reasons I can think of is: > > > >* Security considerations in a multiuser / multiprocess environment. > > What security considerations are there that are not also present with > any other scheme, whether it is using extended attributes or setting options > in the registry? You would have to have the right privileges to change > the binary. Modification of binary files in a multi-user environment is not a good thing. The registry is there, you may as well use it. Something I have not yet seen mentioned is the fact that each user can have a separate profile in the registry, making it easy for each user to have different settings. Modifying the binary might get just a little frustrating if someone else keeps changing it to the way THEY like things (unless you want to fill your hdd with multiple copies of executables) Also, for a user to be able to modify a binary, they would need write access to that binary. I suspect this would cause nightmares for sys admins, not to mention the possibility of adding back doors directly into the binaries themselves. I bet a normal user can't modify any of the shell binaries in a standard Unix setup. > > >* Will cause problem in environments with active virus protection. > > How does a virus detection program detect the difference between installing > a new version of bash or changing a byte in the existing file? SOME virus protection schemes are now including a mechansim whereby any changes to an executable file will raise a warning. Norman Anitvirus is one in particular that I have used that does this. It's a bit of a pain if you forget to disable that feature before installing any new software. If that installation tries to upgrade, for example, a dll file, as most of them seem to do these days, the Virus detection kicks in and gives you a warning. The same thing would apply to modification of the executables as suggested here. - For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".