--- rxvt-unicode/doc/rxvt.7.txt 2006/01/16 15:12:48 1.46 +++ rxvt-unicode/doc/rxvt.7.txt 2006/01/17 16:22:41 1.47 @@ -188,24 +188,21 @@ I need to make it setuid/setgid to support utmp/ptys on my OS, is this safe? - Likely not. While I honestly try to make it secure, and am probably - not bad at it, I think it is simply unreasonable to expect all of - freetype + fontconfig + xft + xlib + perl + ... + rxvt-unicode - itself to all be secure. Also, rxvt-unicode disables some options - when it detects that it runs setuid or setgid, which is not nice. - Besides, with the embedded perl interpreter the possibility for - security problems easily multiplies. - - Elevated privileges are only required for utmp and pty operations on - some systems (for example, GNU/Linux doesn't need any extra - privileges for ptys, but some need it for utmp support). It is - planned to mvoe this into a forked handler process, but this is not - yet done. - - So, while setuid/setgid operation is supported and not a problem on - your typical single-user-no-other-logins unix desktop, always - remember that its an awful lot of code, most of which isn't checked - for security issues regularly. + It should be, starting with release 7.1. You are encouraged to + properly install urxvt with privileges necessary for your OS now. + + When rxvt-unicode detects that it runs setuid or setgid, it will + fork into a helper process for privileged operations (pty handling + on some systems, utmp/wtmp/lastlog handling on others) and drop + privileges immediately. This is much safer than most other terminals + that keep privileges while running (but is more relevant to urxvt, + as it contains things as perl interpreters, which might be "helpful" + to attackers). + + This forking is done as the very first within main(), which is very + early and reduces possible bugs to initialisation code run before + main(), or things like the dynamic loader of your system, which + should result in very little risk. When I log-in to another system it tells me about missing terminfo data? The terminal description used by rxvt-unicode is not as widely @@ -1648,10 +1645,6 @@ the favourite of the rxvt-unicode author, having used it for many years. - --enable-half-shadow (default: off) - Make shadows on the scrollbar only half the normal width & height. - only applicable to rxvt scrollbars. - --enable-ttygid (default: off) Change tty device setting to group "tty" - only use this if your system uses this type of security.