4 ms·

> It still requires delegated root access. Not sure what you mean by that exactly, but the user doesn't need to enter his password or root's for signed package

• yebyen 9y ago
  You can also set up sudo so that it does not require your password for certain commands, that does not mean you are not still getting root to do a thing that requires root permissions. It sounds like it has been made relatively "safer" but, the comment you linked says that it's the author's opinion it is a bad idea, because the user is doing something they are not allowed to undo. So you are getting root access, via policy. Why do you need root access when you could just write the package contents out to a directory you control, and run them without any signatures or policy? (Or even with verifying signatures, why not I guess...) I'm not asking you personally for a position on this, I'm just explaining how it's different... you are still taking root, only through a safety wrapper. The advantages to this that I can see are 1) the user is encouraged to install signed packages, and 2) the sysadmin is empowered to keep the user's installed packages up-to-date. Those are maybe compelling, but I don't see major advantages. Give me something like rvm+bundler and I'll be a lot happier. (I don't really want sysadmin to have powers to do things that I can't undo, either!)
  • jhasse 9y ago
    > You can also set up sudo so that it does not require your password for certain commands, that does not mean you are not still getting root to do a thing that requires root permissions. The difference is, that this is configured by default on Fedora. > Why do you need root access when you could just write the package contents out to a directory you control, and run them without any signatures or policy? Because applications have their paths hard-coded all over the place. Also some packages (e. g. webservers running on port 80) wouldn't work without root anyway.
    • yebyen 9y ago
      "By default" is just not very convincing for me. I know that RedHat has some very qualified people working for them, but the user is getting root and doing root things, regardless of whether or not they enter their password, or if the distro has deigned that it's OK. RedHat has some very peculiar ideas about security, and I'm not saying that in a bad way. Someone decided that this was OK. In the same way, OpenShift (another RedHat product, their Kubernetes distro) decided that it was unsafe to allow users with "project admin" rights to create a DaemonSet within their own project. After reading their position, I have to say I agree (DaemonSets run with a higher priority than ReplicaSet, so a malicious user could use their Project Admin privileges to swamp an entire cluster, preventing other pods from running. You need the Cluster Admin role for this.) The fact this is configured by default, does not mean much to me. If you trust Fedora to review every package for security vulnerabilities before it is signed and released, that's fine! You should, if you are using their distribution. My InfoSec group does not grant root privileges to non-root users without a good reason, and I am certain even explained properly, they would balk and groan about this policy. It is a potential avenue for privilege escalation, and the only reason it could be safe is because of the vigilance of Fedora team. That's convenient, but not very "belt and suspenders" in my opinion. > applications have their paths hard-coded all over the place This is open-source, if an application has a hard-coded path, it can be fixed. If it isn't open-source, I'd assume RH won't sign the packages. Good software remains portable by making these things configurable in a .conf or environment variable (and good upstream dev teams will accept patches to make their software more portable). That is surely a problem as you have highlighted and good software shouldn't have hard-coded paths all over the place without reason. So we shouldn't optimize for that case. > Also some packages (e. g. webservers running on port 80) wouldn't work without root anyway. That is by design, that is why those are called privileged ports (<1024.) Maybe it is inconvenient, but how does allowing the user to install a web server as root and start listening on port 80, improve any part of this particular user story? What exactly is your user going to do with a running web server listening on Port 80 when they still need to be added to httpd group (by root) or they can't write to /var/www, and what's the point of letting them install the package when they still can't make adjustments to /etc/httpd.conf without root access?
      • 9y ago