38WRITING SECURE PRIVILEGED PROGRAMS
Privileged programs have access to features and resources (files, devices, and so on) that are not available to ordinary users. A program can run with privileges by two general means:
• The program was started under a privileged user ID. Many daemons and network servers, which are typically run as root, fall into this category.
• The program has its set-user-ID or set-group-ID permission bit set. When a set-user-ID (set-group-ID) program is execed, it changes the effective user (group) ID of the process to be the same as the owner (group) of the program file. (We first described set-user-ID and set-group-ID programs in Section 9.3.) In this chapter, we’ll sometimes use the term set-user-ID-root to distinguish ...
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