5 ms·
Why does it matter if Firefox ran as root or not? I agree it's terrible practice in principle. But most people will run Firefox as their ordinary user, which no
by avian 9y ago
Why does it matter if Firefox ran as root or not? I agree it's terrible practice in principle. But most people will run Firefox as their ordinary user, which normally has full access to the files in their home directory.
If someone gets arbitrary code execution under your user, they can erase/encrypt your files. Who cares if the OS files are safe. All the data you really care about will be gone.
- pedrocr 9y agoThere may be things an exploit can do as root that wouldn't work under your user to break out of the adobe flash "sandbox". But yeah, the real recommendation is to get rid of flash and kill it with fire. The security of free software isn't fullproof but good riddance from the web to that particular closed source blob.
- 4lch3m1st 9y agoThe whole point of security and good practices is to make harder for those arbitrary codes to be executed (or for whatever other flaws to be exploited, until they're fixed). Running a browser as root is not good practice. Doesn't mean that something bad will happen, but it's more or less line laying the cheese on the ground and expecting mice not to go after it. Even if you have none around, you just shouldn't risk it. At all. Unless you know exactly what you're doing.
- fulafel 9y agoFirefox has some sandboxing on Linux, though it's quite recent.
- jerheinze 9y agoIt had level 2 content sandboxing from FF54, and level 3 (which has write and read access restrictions) with FF57. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Sandbox#Current_Status https://wiki.mozilla.org/Sandbox#Current_Status https://wiki.mozilla.org/Sandbox#Content_Levels_2 https://wiki.mozilla.org/Sandbox#Content_Levels_2
- fulafel 9y agoThanks. The post is more than a few months old, it predates FF 54 (released in July 2017).
- zanny 9y agoThis is why I wish people took mandatory access control more seriously. But to make it really pervasive and useful you need something like what Android has, where the file format mandates MAC profiles for the app. Even Red Hat cannot maintain SELinux profiles for every package in every repo, and even then third parties would complain about having to write the profiles just for RHEL / Fedora packages. It is something the entire ecosystem would have to, at once, agree to make happen, and then standardize mandated MAC profiles in every package format. So basically never.
- throwmenow_0140 9y agoagree. ordinary user is absolutely sufficient. I'll now present a sophisticated privilege escalation method that most of us won't notice (me included, sarcasm off): alias sudo='/usr/bin/sudo echo something evil && /usr/bin/sudo' I don't think it matters that he used his root account. Edit: Maybe I'm wrong with my opinion, you can disable ASLR using your root rights... https://askubuntu.com/a/318476 https://askubuntu.com/a/318476 Edit: Last exploit for Linux remote exploitation with Flash is from 2015 https://www.rapid7.com/db/modules/exploit/multi/browser/adobe_flash_hacking_team_uaf https://www.rapid7.com/db/modules/exploit/multi/browser/adob... or did I miss something here?
- wrycoder 9y agoI use /usr/bin/sudo <>
- chrisfosterelli 9y agoSo they check .bash_history and then they realize they just need to also `alias /usr/bin/sudo`.
- wrycoder 9y agoHm. How about ‘sudo’ <> ? i.e. quote the command?
- chrisfosterelli 9y agoBased on the sibling comment to yours, I don't think bash supports this. zsh allows you to make a \'sudo\' alias though, so it depends on your shell.
- wrycoder 9y agoAt least in bash, quoting the command disables any alias. Maybe also in zsh?
- michaelmrose 9y agoIts possible to run firefox with fewer privileges so that the only thing it could delete are your recent downloads.