this post was submitted on 09 May 2024
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Why not just fix sudo then?
Some people are opposed to
sudobeing a fairly complex program with an awkward to understand configuration language and a couple of methods that can fetch config from elsewhere. Fixing upstreamsudocan't happen because those features exist and are presumably used by some subset of people, so straight up removing them is not good, but luckilydoasandsudo-rsexist as alternatives with a somewhat stripped featureset and less footguns.Others are opposed to the concept of SUID. Underneath all the SUID stuff lies far more complexity than is obvious at first sight. There's a pretty decent chunk of code in glibc's libdl that will treat all kinds of environment variables differently based on whether an executable is SUID, and when that goes wrong, it's reported as a glibc bug (last year's glibc CVE-2023-4911 was this). And that gets all the more weird when fancy Linux features like namespaces get involved.
Removing SUID requires an entirely different implementation and the service manager is the logical place for that. That's not just Lennart's idea; s6, as minimal and straight to the point as it tends to be, also implements
s6-sudo{,d,c}. It's a bit more awkward to use but is a perfectly "Unix philosophy" style implementation of this very same idea.Or just use
doas, it's still more secure than sudo