:man| Alphabetical   Categories   About us 
 
SETUID (2) | System calls | Unix Manual Pages | :man

NAME

setuid, seteuid, setgid, setegid - set user and group ID

CONTENTS

Library
Synopsis
Description
Return Values
Errors
Security Considerations
See Also
Standards
History

LIBRARY


.Lb libc

SYNOPSIS


.In sys/types.h
.In unistd.h int setuid "uid_t uid" int seteuid "uid_t euid" int setgid "gid_t gid" int setegid "gid_t egid"

DESCRIPTION

The setuid system call sets the real and effective user IDs and the saved set-user-ID of the current process to the specified value. The setuid system call is permitted if the specified ID is equal to the real user ID or the effective user ID of the process, or if the effective user ID is that of the super user.

The setgid system call sets the real and effective group IDs and the saved set-group-ID of the current process to the specified value. The setgid system call is permitted if the specified ID is equal to the real group ID or the effective group ID of the process, or if the effective user ID is that of the super user.

The seteuid system call (setegid) sets the effective user ID (group ID) of the current process. The effective user ID may be set to the value of the real user ID or the saved set-user-ID (see intro(2) and execve(2)); in this way, the effective user ID of a set-user-ID executable may be toggled by switching to the real user ID, then re-enabled by reverting to the set-user-ID value. Similarly, the effective group ID may be set to the value of the real group ID or the saved set-group-ID.

RETURN VALUES


.Rv -std

ERRORS

The system calls will fail if:
[EPERM]
The user is not the super user and the ID specified is not the real, effective ID, or saved ID.

SECURITY CONSIDERATIONS

Read and write permissions to files are determined upon a call to open(2). Once a file descriptor is open, dropping privilege does not affect the process’s read/write permissions, even if the user ID specified has no read or write permissions to the file. These files normally remain open in any new process executed, resulting in a user being able to read or modify potentially sensitive data.

To prevent these files from remaining open after an exec(3) call, be sure to set the close-on-exec flag is set:
void
pseudocode(void)
{
int fd;
/* ... */


fd = open("/path/to/sensitive/data", O_RDWR);
if (fd == -1)
err(1, "open");


/*
* Set close-on-exec flag; see fcntl(2) for more information.
*/
if (fcntl(fd, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) == -1)
err(1, "fcntl(F_SETFD)");
/* ... */
execve(path, argv, environ);
}

SEE ALSO

getgid(2), getuid(2), issetugid(2), setregid(2), setreuid(2)

STANDARDS

HISTORY

 
Created by Blin Media, 2008-2013