From: Christian Jaeger (christian.jaeger_at_ethlife.ethz.ch)
Date: Thu 13 May 2004 - 22:09:55 BST
At 20:19 Uhr +0000 13.05.2004, Liam Helmer wrote:
>I think that you're honestly better off creating some kind of pipe or
>socket where the commands come through, which has a list of functions
>that it can provide. That way you can have a list, and see if there's a
>match for what's sent. It'd really be quite hard to implement a SUID
>type of arrangement here in a way that's secure... a lot of variables.
That discussion of server-running-with-capabilities versus
setuid-binary is basically the same as on normal unix anyway. You
could remove the setuid functionality completely from unix if you
(are able to) always arrange for an already-running program with the
target capabilities. With one (only one?) exception, which is that
the server cannot determine which user is at the other end of the
socket (Dan Bernstein, the Qmail developer, has written a page
complaining about this). And of course it could be difficult or
resource wasting to have daemons running for all possible purposes.
I think in a way vserver basically just extends the normal linux/unix
permission system to the next level; setuid in linux/unix already
works, now it "would have" to be extended to the vserver
functionality as well. (And checksums should not be needed, rather it
should be that the relevant files are immutable by vservers - just
like where in the normal setuid case, an insecure user should not be
able to modify any file of a setuid application.)
However, I don't think such a "setxid-bit" (set-context)
functionality would be important for me, and since one reason to
choose vserver (over just normal user accounts on a vserver-less
machine) is to protect against the risks of setuid binaries (local
root holes), introducing setxid binaries would sort of defeat the
purpose of vserver :-)
Christian.
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