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Message-ID: <20140610215518.GP179@brightrain.aerifal.cx>
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
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