On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 11:57:36AM -0700, John Plocher wrote:
> In "sudo land", I'm used to a model where
> 
>    I'm just "me" until I wish to increase my abilities, at
>    which point I sudo to enable my superpowers.  When I'm
>    done playing god, (and stop using sudo) those powers go
>    away.
> 
> in "RBAC land", the model seems to be
> 
>    I'm never just me, I always have some set of superpowers
>    that I can never turn off, so I always need to be more
>    careful about consequences and side effects.
> 
> Am I misunderstanding things? If so, you can probably ignore
> the rest (except maybe for humor value).

You did misunderstand RBAC.

In RBAC land pfexec is the equivalent of sudo.

IF you use a pf*sh THEN you have what you described above.  And one
could just as easily write sudo*sh too.  These shells are like normal
shells that prepend pfexec (or SUDO, if there were sudo*sh shells) to
every non-built-in command-line.

The only differences between SUDO and RBAC are:

 - how the authorization DB is represented (sudoers vs. prof_attr +
   auth_attr + exec_attr + user_attr)

 - minor feature differences (like SUDO can let you reference all
   executables in a directory, use the not operator, specify argument
   pattern matching, ...)

Nico
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