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by bodyfour 4288 days ago
> On OSX and Solaris, I've chmod'ed 0000 /bin/bash with no apparent ill effect so far.

In the case of OSX, /bin/sh is also bash. For some reason they are separate binaries (at least on my laptop running 10.9.5) but they're both really bash inside:

    $ ls -ld /bin/sh /bin/bash
    -r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  1228240 Sep 21 21:37 /bin/bash
    -r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  1228304 Sep 21 21:37 /bin/sh
    $ /bin/sh --version
    GNU bash, version 3.2.51(1)-release (x86_64-apple-darwin13)
    Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
    $ /bin/bash --version
    GNU bash, version 3.2.51(1)-release (x86_64-apple-darwin13)
    Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
So even if you chmod bash to 0 you could still be exposed by anything that uses /bin/sh -- system(), popen(), most shell scripts, etc

(ETA: as I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread most people running OSX probably aren't badly impacted since they're not running CGI-based web software or other high-risk activity. I'm just pointing out that your bash-ectomy of OSX isn't as complete as you think it was)

1 comments

Yikes, yes. Thanks for pointing that out!

There might be more of an impact than expected on OSX, too -- no telling what Apple does with their system services.

We've seen mention of dhcp-client and CUPS. The latter, at least, could also be an issue on OSX.