rtools were deemed almost unused 15 years ago...

[Brooks Davis]

On Tue, Jun 20, 2017 at 03:59:54PM +0200, Michael Gmelin wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, 20 Jun 2017 13:11:37 +0200
> Baptiste Daroussin <bapt at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Jun 20, 2017 at 12:25:46PM +0200, Jeremie Le Hen wrote:
> > > Hey folks,
> > > 
> > > I remember when I was still barely out of my teenagehood, people
> > > were mostly using ssh/scp while rtools (rsh, rlogin, ... for the
> > > youngsters) were left in place as a courtesy for legacy production
> > > systems still relying it on them.
> > > 
> > > Fast forward to 2017 (so yes, 15 years later), stack-clash [1]
> > > sorely reminds us that suid binaries are an attack surface. I don't
> > > even need to mention that it's a healthy engineering practice to
> > > remove unused code, both from a maintenance and security
> > > perspective.
> > > 
> > > Therefore, I hereby propose to remove rtools from the base system.
> > > I acknowledge this will likely cause troubles for a handful of
> > > people who are still relying on it for good or bad reasons. But the
> > > flipside is that the attack surface of millions of FreeBSD
> > > installed out there will be reduced.
> > > 
> > > The proposed roadmap is:
> > > - disable from the build on head and let it soak for one month
> > > - remove rtools from the base.
> > > 
> > > What do you guys think?  Any preferred color for the bikeshed? :)
> > > 
> > > [1] https://www.qualys.com/2017/06/19/stack-clash/stack-clash.txt  
> > 
> > Yeah!
> > 
> > Is telnetd part of your list?
> 
> As long as the telnet(1) client stays in I'm all for it.

Given the state of maintenance of our telnet code
(FreeBSD-SA-16:36.telnetd fixed a bug fixed in heimdal telnet well over
a decade ago), all the telnet code should be purged.  For most uses nc
will suffice.  For others, we should make sure there's something in
ports: either the crufty base system one or something like
https://github.com/seanmiddleditch/libtelnet/

-- Brooks
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