On Tue, 6 Feb 2007, Andrea "bunker" Purificato wrote:
[After months of silence from the "HP Software Security Response Team"] -Type: Information leak -Risk: low -Author: Andrea "bunker" Purificato - http://rawlab.mindcreations.com -Description: the "ps" command (also /usr/ucb/ps) on HP OSF1 v5.1 Alpha, developed without an eye to security, allows unprivileged users to see values of all processes environment variables. It's something similar to "raptor_ucbps" (by Marco Ivaldi) for Solaris. I've tested it only on OSF1 v5.1 1885. If you remove bit suid from executable, "ps" doesn't work correctly. -Code: http://rawlab.mindcreations.com/codes/exp/nix/osf1true64ps.ksh
Your post reminded me of something I had read in some program's documentation many moons ago.
Quote from the Postgres documentation:"PGPASSWORD sets the password used if the server demands password authentication. Use of this environment variable is not recommended for security reasons (some operating systems allow non-root users to see process environment variables via ps); instead consider using the ~/.pgpass file (see Section 29.13)."
I kind of wonder if they are specifically refering to Tru64, or if there are others too. I would guess the behavior you just discovered has been known for a long time.
Ivan PS: Why should ps to work correctly without the setuid bit?