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🥺: the best sudo replacement

xeiaso.net

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Re: 🥺: the best sudo replacement

#81

Post by xena »

tristor wrote: post #69
bee_rider wrote: post #43

I mean clearly this is all quite tongue in cheek but: > It's also debatable if the entire concept of privilege separation as implemented in Linux and UNIX was a bad idea to begin with but we're stuck with it because of an endless ball of legacy programs controlled by egotistical open source people that refuse to change […] Not a very charitable way to describe volunteers who don’t want to learn the flavor-of-the-mont…

Honestly, I don't think you should take anything the author of this wrote seriously, the most charitable interpretation is that most of their work is a form of satire.

Speaking as the author of the work, most of _this post_ is satire meant to make you think about the existing security boundaries involved in privilege escalation. It is a false problem. The part about being annoyed that sudo is still written in C is coming from a sense of exasperation that there's still more predictable memory safety bugs involved with sudo because it's still written in C. The comment about python-cryptography failing to move to Rust because of random Gentoo uses holding it back was from a sense of exasperation that we can't have "nice things". I'm tired of having to emergency patch everything because we as an industry can't make our fundamental security tools _measurably safer_ with languages like Rust.

I am a lot more serious in my other posts (such as this one: https://xeiaso.net/blog/2022-media or this one: https://xeiaso.net/blog/hlang-nguh), but sometimes I have to write satirical things otherwise people won't get the point.

Believe what you want though.

Re: 🥺: the best sudo replacement

#83

Post by deathanatos »

untech wrote: post #59
UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #28

I know I'm an old fart but this is yet another reason why I don't want my servers supporting UTF-8. LC_ALL=C It's important and NECESSARY to be inclusive, and as long as nginx can still provide the UTF-8 characters I don't care; but there is no way I can allow anything other then US ASCII to be on the terminal.

How would you read git log output with non-ascii author names then?

That actually didn't work not too long ago. I don't remember if it was git or less, but "unicode" characters it would end up getting reified as, e.g., "", as I recall.

Thankfully it got fixed at some point.

Re: 🥺: the best sudo replacement

#85

Post by mid-kid »

eliaspro wrote: post #64

I replaced "sudo" in all my systems a long time ago with an alias to "machinectl shell .host" which is IMHO far superior to it, as it doesn't just spawn a new shell as a privileged process, but instead initializes a full user-session and then spawns a shell in this user-session. This doesn't carry the risk of tainting the new session with the context of the initiating shell (pwd, env, ...) and doesn't only feel like…

Sudo's -i option is able to provide you with a shell in the same state that it'd be if it were a fresh login. I've burned this into my fingers a long time ago. Also, in most configurations you have to specifically whitelist environment variables for them to surivive a "sudo" call.

Re: 🥺: the best sudo replacement

#86

Post by RealStickman_ »

dhosek wrote: post #63
xena wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ironic part is that I didn't break any RSS readers! I broke URL parsers in chat apps, scp, and for command line arguments to `tailscale serve`.

I have a poem that I published which has a Japanese title (宝石の十字架). The journal that published it put that in the URL: https://www.invisiblecitylit.com/poetry/宝石の十字架/ and not surprisingly, many URL parsers don’t like the Japanese text.¹ I really need to get around to changing the link that I have in my publications list to use the URL encoded version of the title so that it's easier to share on systems that don’t lik…

Emoji domain names exist, so I'm pretty sure you can put anything you want in your URL. Displaying the URL might differ though.

https://xn--i-7iq.ws/

Re: 🥺: the best sudo replacement

#87

Post by gumby »

Typing emoji is a pain, but the chat suggests that that might be an advantage:

> Using this program requires you to be able to type an emoji. Most attack code is of such poor quality that they are unable to run commands named with emoji.

Re: 🥺: the best sudo replacement

#88

Post by mid-kid »

CameronNemo wrote: post #35

For some more serious alternatives, I have heard of many people finding doas to be a drop in replacement. Furthermore, I've heard some people suggest neither doas nor sudo, but instead using an SSH server to gain root access to your local machine. It could listen on localhost and use key-based auth to allow root logins...

Using key-based auth without encrypting the key with a password sounds like a bad idea, as then any program running on the host can trivially gain root privileges.

Re: 🥺: the best sudo replacement

#89

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

> They wrote the program in C

They wrote it in 1980 for unix; what exactly would you like them to have used?

> (as far as I can tell) have no intention of rewriting it in Rust

Since it will be less than a paragraph before you start ranting about how "obscure targets that nobody uses won't be able to leech off of the rest of the ecosystem by holding back any chance to let us have a modicum of nice things", I trust you, who would surely never be a "leech", have written an actual replacement or submitted patches to start improving the situation? Or perhaps are funding such efforts?

Re: 🥺: the best sudo replacement

#90

Post by xena »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #89

> They wrote the program in C They wrote it in 1980 for unix; what exactly would you like them to have used? > (as far as I can tell) have no intention of rewriting it in Rust Since it will be less than a paragraph before you start ranting about how "obscure targets that nobody uses won't be able to leech off of the rest of the ecosystem by holding back any chance to let us have a modicum of nice things", I trust you…

I did write an actual replacement. It's what TFA is about :)
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