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Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announced

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Re: Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announced

#21
post #19
post #10

> The developer talks about the weaknesses of sudo, and how it has a large possible attack surface Poettering's hypocrisy is painful.

Is it? Does systemd's sudo replacement also have a lot of complex code running as root in a suid binary? Because that's what he's complaining about

People blame systemd for making the liblzma problem larger than it should have been.

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=171227941117852&w=2

"Liblzma ends up dynamically linked to sshd because of a systemd-related extension added by many Linux packagers that pulls in liblzma as an unrelated dependency."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39866076

"openssh does not directly use liblzma. However debian and several other distributions patch openssh to support systemd notification, and libsystemd does depend on lzma."

Re: Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announced

#23
post #13

But they already ship pkexec together with systemd anyway via polkit, why are they again reinventing a wheel they already reinvented? Unit files are a neat concept I don't want to miss again, but everything else done by Lennart seems to be an inceasingly stupid mistake born from hubris.

This seems like it won't break anything except really exotic scripts, I think it will probably be a good thing for at least the main target audience of systemd, id imagine it might somehow suck for others though.

Re: Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announced

#26
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? Does systemd's sudo replacement also have a lot of complex code running as root in a suid binary? Because that's what he's complaining about

People blame systemd for making the liblzma problem larger than it should have been. https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=171227941117852&w=2 "Liblzma ends up dynamically linked to sshd because of a systemd-related extension added by many Linux packagers that pulls in liblzma as an unrelated dependency." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39866076 "openssh does not directly use liblzma. However debian and several ot…

[deleted]

Re: Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announced

#27
post #13

But they already ship pkexec together with systemd anyway via polkit, why are they again reinventing a wheel they already reinvented? Unit files are a neat concept I don't want to miss again, but everything else done by Lennart seems to be an inceasingly stupid mistake born from hubris.

Not all distros ship pkexec with polkit. Polkit runs fine without pkexec present. This is kind of a non-suid alternative to pkexec. It's really more similar to a local-only ssh though.

Re: Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announced

#28
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? Does systemd's sudo replacement also have a lot of complex code running as root in a suid binary? Because that's what he's complaining about

People blame systemd for making the liblzma problem larger than it should have been. https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=171227941117852&w=2 "Liblzma ends up dynamically linked to sshd because of a systemd-related extension added by many Linux packagers that pulls in liblzma as an unrelated dependency." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39866076 "openssh does not directly use liblzma. However debian and several ot…

So that's your best shot against systemd?

- Linux packagers decide to patch sshd to use libsystemd for a notification, that could have been trivially done without this library.

- libsystemd depends on libzlma

- libzlma depends on xz

And therefore, systemd is insecure?

And what does this have to do with the fact that SUID is a terrible idea that needs to go?

Re: Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announced

#30

Wasn't the recent liblzma attack already exploiting the fact that systemd has its hands in pretty much everything? Wouldn't this expand further the attack surface of systemd and the systems that connect with it?

That's not a great summary of lzma. It was systems adding custom patch to ssh which used a systemd-related library which it didn't really need in the first place. It's a stack of issues that don't have much to do with systemd itself really.

But re. expanding the attack surface - unlikely. Systemd's primary purpose is to start processes with the right environment / permissions. systemd-run/run0 basically give you the tool to invoke that functionality with a terminal attached to it. That's smaller scope of extra code than sudo/doas deal with.

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