Re: [RFC] Dealing with World-writable Files in the Archive of CPAN Distributions

On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 6:23 PM, Eric Wilhelm
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Yes.  Would someone please explain to me how this issue is not already
> made a mostly non-issue by having a proper umask and running CPAN as
> non-root?

Someone in the thread (sorry, forget who and I'm not going to search
for it) gave the example that access to Makefile.PL allows arbitrary
additions to the Makefile install target that a non-root user might
well run with "sudo make install" -- thus a Makefile.PL compromise
could be used to execute arbitrary code as root.

I'm not saying it's a big threat.  Risk level is the combination of
likelihood of an event and the severity of the event and the first is
low.

Nevertheless, stopping archive extraction from creating world-readable
files is probably a good idea.

-- David