On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 12:28:43AM +0000, Kerin Millar wrote > On 10/02/2014 23:57, Walter Dnes wrote: > > > > What's the point, if you still have to run as root (or su or sudo) for > > the emerge update process? > > It's the principle of least privilege. Is there any specific reason for > portage to fork and exec rsync as root? Is rsync sandboxed? Should rsync > have unfettered read/write access to all mounted filesystems? Can it be > guaranteed that rsync hasn't been compromised? Can it be guaranteed that > PORTAGE_RSYNC_OPTS will contain safe options at all times? > > The answer to all of these questions is "no". Basically, the combination > of usersync and non-root ownership of PORTDIR hardens the process in a > sensible way while conferring no disadvantage.
If /usr/portage is owned by portage:portage, then wouldn't a user (member of portage) be able to do mischief by tweaking ebuilds? E.g. modify an ebuild to point to a tarball located on a usb stick, at http://127.0.0.1/media/sdc1/my_tarball.tgz. This would allow a local user to supply code that gets built and then installed in /usr/bin, or /sbin, etc. -- Walter Dnes <waltd...@waltdnes.org> I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications
