[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2014 17:55:18 -0400
From: Rich Felker <dalias@...c.org>
To: musl@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: musl 1.0.x branch
On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 11:25:06PM +0200, Natanael Copa wrote:
> On Tue, 10 Jun 2014 12:03:56 -0400
> Rich Felker <dalias@...c.org> wrote:
>
> > FYI you can emulate the usefulness of suid, without the danger, by
> > having a daemon on a unix socket that you connect to which provides
> > the functionality. This is a vastly superior design because there is
> > exactly one input channel to the code running with elevated privileges
> > (the socket) as opposed to unboundedly many (environment, open fds,
> > resource limits, working directory, priority, signal mask and
> > dispositions, cpu affinity, ... and whatever else the kernel folks add
> > in the future).
>
> You probably knew but this is what OpenBSD does instead of suid + PAM:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_Authentication
>
> I have always liked this approach.
I'm not really familiar with BSD stuff, but yes, it sounds like a much
better alternative to the insanity (which is the only way you can
describe loading arbitrary, poorly-written code directly into
privileged processes for authentication/login purposes) of PAM.
Of course an independent PAM implementation could do the same thing by
offloading the actual work to a separate authentication daemon (and
dropping support for all of the other junk PAM can do to the calling
process) while keeping the same API or even ABI.
Rich
Powered by blists - more mailing lists
Confused about mailing lists and their use?
Read about mailing lists on Wikipedia
and check out these
guidelines on proper formatting of your messages.
