Since MaxMind does not offer any GeoIP/GeoLite data services anymore when not being registered with MaxMind, the current permissions of /etc/GeoIP.conf are incorrect from my point of view, because world-readable is too relaxed and causes by default the leak of the credentials to other local (unprivileged) Linux system users (who could copy them to third-party systems or whatever):
From my point of view, the permissions should be 0640 instead of 0644 aka world-readable. System administrators that want to relax the permissions for specific purposes should explicitly do so themself.
I agree that it would be better if this file was not world-readable. This would likely be a breaking change for some users. We will likely hold off changing this until we release a new major version.
Since MaxMind does not offer any GeoIP/GeoLite data services anymore when not being registered with MaxMind, the current permissions of
/etc/GeoIP.conf
are incorrect from my point of view, because world-readable is too relaxed and causes by default the leak of the credentials to other local (unprivileged) Linux system users (who could copy them to third-party systems or whatever):From my point of view, the permissions should be
0640
instead of0644
aka world-readable. System administrators that want to relax the permissions for specific purposes should explicitly do so themself.