On Fri, 13 Dec 2002, [iso-8859-1] Diego T. wrote:
> Hello I'm an Italian student of computer science at
> University of Rome "La Sapienza". I've to analyze some
> daemons which run under root privileges with a tool
> developed by my departement. This tool intercepts
> critical syscalls, like Execve, and blocks illegal
> invocation of that primitives (E.g. Execve("/bin/sh"))
> performed by a daemon which runs under root
> privileges. This approach blocks buffer overflow
> attacks before they can complete (or I hope so). Now,
> the problem is that postgres doesn' t run under root
> privileges and that the tool intercepts only the
> syscalls invoked by a process with root privileges. Is
> possible to force postgres to run under root
> privileges? How can be done? I know my request is
> anomalous but i've to do this for my laboratory
> project course. I should be very grateful if you'll
> answer as soon as possible.
You could probably just hack out the checks in main/main.c
and recompile, but postgres does call system and such to do
things (like create databases) so I'm not sure it'd be terribly
useful for you.