| |||||||||||||
People's reaction to this is just stupid.People's reaction to this is just stupid.Posted Nov 19, 2009 23:40 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333)In reply to: People's reaction to this is just stupid. by dlang Parent article: Fedora 12 lets unprivileged users install packages
Sure.
Having setuid root binaries is a security problem themselves, period, and
(Log in to post comments)
People's reaction to this is just stupid. Posted Nov 20, 2009 0:44 UTC (Fri) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048) [Link]
At least suid is trivially auditable (find!) and there is decades of established practices, policy, and procedures in dealing with it. I can walk into any library or bookstore and find books on securing systems that cover the subject of SUID binaries and that knowledge and experience is generally portable, not just to all GNU/Linux distributions but across unixes in general.
Eliminating SUID by replacing it with controls buried in a windows-registry like database isn't necessarily an improvement.
People's reaction to this is just stupid. Posted Nov 20, 2009 1:21 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Eliminating SUID by replacing it with controls buried in a windows- registry like database isn't necessarily an improvement.Not always, of course. But I think in the case of policykit and the other *kits it is. This is simply because it should be unnecessary to perform normal desktop operations without resorting to running privileged code under a user's account. These things eliminate that for common cases. I don't think that sudo/su should be eliminated for everything. It should be reserved as a administrative tool and users should only be required to be prompted for the root password or run root code under their account in special cases. I think that in the cases of installing/updating software is such a mundane and everyday event that invoking root password or running code as root is diminishing the security of the typical desktop scenario when a alternative exists. Now for managed desktops then that sort of activity should be forbidden, which is easy enough to accomplish through packagekit/policykit. (also I don't consider storing policy as XML files in directories to be anything like what the negative things the windows registry does...) I do think that having this default spread to _all_ user accounts by default is a bad idea, though.
|
|||||||||||||