Re: lpd: the thin edge of the wedge?

Greg 'groggy' Lehey <[email protected]> writes:
> I'm really quite concerned about the plans to remove lpd.  I
> understand that there are security issues with lpd, even if I haven't
> heard any reports of exploits in over a third of a century, but the
> approach seems wrong to me.

Feel free to review https://reviews.freebsd.org/D55399 yourself, keeping
in mind that it addresses only _some_ of the issues I found in just
_one_ of the 28 source files that make up lpr / lpd.  I estimate the
effort needed to overhaul the entire code base and add tests to about
200 hours or two months full-time.  I haven't tracked my time so far but
I spent about three days full time on just this patch and a few others
(D55400 adds a socket timeout to mitigate another possible attack, a
bunch of other patches fix build system issues such as parts of lpr /
lpd going into the wrong pkgbase package or not being deleted when the
LPR option is turned off).

I would also like to point out that:

- I have not removed lpr / lpd.  I have merely marked them deprecated
  and proposed a plan to remove them in or around September 2027, which
  is more than a year and half from now, unless they have significantly
  improved in the interim.

- I have done more to improve lpd and keep it alive in the last 5 days
  than everyone else combined in the last 25 years.  But I can't
  continue to neglect my paying customers to fix something that almost
  nobody uses.  Someone will have to step up to either do the work or
  hire me to do it.

- Simply moving the code to ports will do nothing to address the
  underlying issue, and I will strenuously object to adding software
  with known vulnerabilities to the ports tree.

- Some of the issues with lpd cannot be fixed because they are inherent
  to its design, which cannot be changed without breaking compatibility,
  which is _the only reason_ to keep lpd.  The rest of the world has
  moved on to IPP.

- There is no spec.  RFC 1179 is not a specification for LPDP, but a
  description of how lpd works, written after the fact by a third party
  who...  didn't understand how lpd actually works.

DES
--
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - [email protected]