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When was the famous "sudo warning" introduced? (2019)

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Re: When was the famous "sudo warning" introduced? (2019)

#41

Post by jolmg »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #30
weitendorf wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is underrated as a design flaw for how Linux tends to be used in 2024. At its most benign it's an anachronism and potential source of complexity, as its worst it's a major source of security vulnerabilities and unintended behavior (eg linux multitenancy was designed for two people in the same lab sharing a server, not for running completely untrusted workloads at huge scale, so it doesn't really implemen…

Actually, I have been wondering if using a Linux system as multi-user could be a boon in security. As single user, each and every process has full and complete control of $HOME. Instead, I would prefer all applications were sandboxed to their own little respective areas with minimal access to data unless explicitly authorized. Without going full QubeOS, get some amount of application separation so my photo utility do…

That's already what's typical with services, e.g. postgresql.service specifies User=postgres.

Re: When was the famous "sudo warning" introduced? (2019)

#43

Post by jcelerier »

Daneel_ wrote: post #27
thousand_nights wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except if you're on a team of sysadmins running a fleet of systems not trying to be rude but this doesn't sound like "most people"

Interesting comment actually. I would have assumed that the vast majority of people using Linux are still sysadmins in small and large companies - this is certainly my personal experience. I wonder how many home users there are versus systems managed by sysadmins. I would still think there’s more in the corporate world, while I would think the opposite for Windows.

The ratio of linux desktop users:sysadmins I know is something like 50:1

Re: When was the famous "sudo warning" introduced? (2019)

#44

Post by godelski »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #30
weitendorf wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is underrated as a design flaw for how Linux tends to be used in 2024. At its most benign it's an anachronism and potential source of complexity, as its worst it's a major source of security vulnerabilities and unintended behavior (eg linux multitenancy was designed for two people in the same lab sharing a server, not for running completely untrusted workloads at huge scale, so it doesn't really implemen…

Actually, I have been wondering if using a Linux system as multi-user could be a boon in security. As single user, each and every process has full and complete control of $HOME. Instead, I would prefer all applications were sandboxed to their own little respective areas with minimal access to data unless explicitly authorized. Without going full QubeOS, get some amount of application separation so my photo utility do…

  > Instead, I would prefer all applications were sandboxed to their own little respective areas with minimal access to data unless explicitly authorized.
You’ll be interested to learn about systemd-nspawn. You can sandbox stuff with it really easily. It is like chroot so not really resource intensive, lighter than a container.

I think a pretty useful thing you can do is boot ephemeral instances. So whatever someone does there gets undone. Useful if you’re doing system testing or CI. Because you just set up the machine once and then your scripts and whatever can do what you want. Perfect example is when trying to test install scripts.

Though this is also kinda the point of flatpak and snap. Though these are controversial in the Linux community. Then again a lot it people dislike systemd, though fewer than originally.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd-nspawn

Re: When was the famous "sudo warning" introduced? (2019)

#45

Post by rendaw »

bombcar wrote: post #39
3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I have been wondering if using a Linux system as multi-user could be a boon in security. As single user, each and every process has full and complete control of $HOME. Instead, I would prefer all applications were sandboxed to their own little respective areas with minimal access to data unless explicitly authorized. Without going full QubeOS, get some amount of application separation so my photo utility do…

Qubes takes that to an extreme: https://www.qubes-os.org/intro/ and runs every application in a virtual machine.

I was experimenting with taking that to a median using containers in nixos. IMO the distinguishing feature of qubes is the fact that there's chrome indicating the security level of a window based on its vm - I put together https://github.com/andrewbaxter/filterway to use with window manager rules to hopefully get the same result.

Re: When was the famous "sudo warning" introduced? (2019)

#46

Post by SoftTalker »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #30
weitendorf wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is underrated as a design flaw for how Linux tends to be used in 2024. At its most benign it's an anachronism and potential source of complexity, as its worst it's a major source of security vulnerabilities and unintended behavior (eg linux multitenancy was designed for two people in the same lab sharing a server, not for running completely untrusted workloads at huge scale, so it doesn't really implemen…

Actually, I have been wondering if using a Linux system as multi-user could be a boon in security. As single user, each and every process has full and complete control of $HOME. Instead, I would prefer all applications were sandboxed to their own little respective areas with minimal access to data unless explicitly authorized. Without going full QubeOS, get some amount of application separation so my photo utility do…

> As single user, each and every process has full and complete control of $HOME. I would prefer all applications were sandboxed to their own little respective areas with minimal access to data unless explicitly authorized.

This is what OpenBSD's unveil does. Firefox for example only has access to ~/Downloads (and some stuff in ~/.mozilla, ~/.config, ~/.cache) in my home directory.

Re: When was the famous "sudo warning" introduced? (2019)

#47

Post by kelnos »

Swizec wrote: post #31
Daneel_ wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting comment actually. I would have assumed that the vast majority of people using Linux are still sysadmins in small and large companies - this is certainly my personal experience. I wonder how many home users there are versus systems managed by sysadmins. I would still think there’s more in the corporate world, while I would think the opposite for Windows.

> I wonder how many home users there are versus systems managed by sysadmins Isn’t Android the most popular Linux distro these days? Probably also most TV set-top boxes and other IoT devices

And ironically an Android user (well, an Android user that uses the "official" OS image from the device's manufacturer) is not the system administrator of their phone/tablet, unless they essentially break into it, or install a different OS image designed to allow root access.

Re: When was the famous "sudo warning" introduced? (2019)

#48

Post by dizhn »

quotemstr wrote: post #32
zoky wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The system has no way of knowing who you are. It can’t tell if you’re really you, or just someone who walked by and started using your computer while you got up to go to the bathroom. If you really think the threat model is outdated, why not just run everything as root? Also, you know you can configure sudo to not ask you for a password, right? So why do you need to use a whole new framework and privilege model to ba…

The system does know who I am: the command is coming from me. An attacker doesn't need to elevate privileges to compromise me: he can steal whatever he needs without becoming root. He can replace sudo and steal my password too. The whole concept of my personal user account needing to elevate to root to make "system" changes is a relict of long-gone days of BBSes, shell accounts, and time sharing. These days, we shoul…

Most distros already sort of elevate the initial users permissions so they can use sound, reboot without a password etc. So this is certainly doable. But doing it systemwise would also allow "rm -rf /" (which is specifically guarded nowadays I know). It's just an additional step. It's also why on most distros the prompt turns red when you're root. I don't have an opinion regarding if this is the right way. I have run as root in the past too. It's been mostly fine.

Re: When was the famous "sudo warning" introduced? (2019)

#50

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

jcelerier wrote: post #43
Daneel_ wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting comment actually. I would have assumed that the vast majority of people using Linux are still sysadmins in small and large companies - this is certainly my personal experience. I wonder how many home users there are versus systems managed by sysadmins. I would still think there’s more in the corporate world, while I would think the opposite for Windows.

The ratio of linux desktop users:sysadmins I know is something like 50:1

Other way round for me
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