rtools were deemed almost unused 15 years ago...

[Ngie Cooper (yaneurabeya)]

> On Jun 20, 2017, at 4:11 AM, 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?

PS telnet is a different ball of wax. I can create fine-grained knobs (_SERVER vs _CLIENT). Unfortunately removing both will require a bit more of an act of congress, but if the patches are available (somewhere… in a ports equivalent version… I know sjg@ maintains one), then we can just refer people to that.
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