Re: Windows environment variables in ssh sessions with privilege seperation

[Brian Dessent <brian at dessent dot net>]

Sean Morgan wrote:

> Adding the environment variables to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM
> \CurrentControlSet\Services\sshd\Parameters\Environment does not seem to
> have an effect outside of the CYGWIN variable which does in fact change
> after editing the registry. This provided me with some verification that
> I had in fact been carrying out my experimentation on the appropriate
> key.

This has nothing to do with privilege separation.  It is by design. 
Please see: <http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2006-10/msg00729.html>

You can see the list of environment variables that are whitelisted in
openbsd-compat/bsd-cygwin_util.c:

static struct wenv {
        const char *name;
        size_t namelen;
} wenv_arr[] = {
        { NL("ALLUSERSPROFILE=") },
        { NL("COMMONPROGRAMFILES=") },
        { NL("COMPUTERNAME=") },
        { NL("COMSPEC=") },
        { NL("CYGWIN=") },
        { NL("NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS=") },
        { NL("OS=") },
        { NL("PATH=") },
        { NL("PATHEXT=") },
        { NL("PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE=") },
        { NL("PROCESSOR_IDENTIFIER=") },
        { NL("PROCESSOR_LEVEL=") },
        { NL("PROCESSOR_REVISION=") },
        { NL("PROGRAMFILES=") },
        { NL("SYSTEMDRIVE=") },
        { NL("SYSTEMROOT=") },
        { NL("TMP=") },
        { NL("TEMP=") },
        { NL("WINDIR=") }
};

Those are the only environment variables that will be propagated into
the newly created session.  The proper way to handle this is to set them
in an /etc/profile-type file, as you would on a unix/linux system.

Brian

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