On Fri, 2016-10-21 at 13:40 +0200, Alad Wenter wrote: > While looking suid files on my system I noticed that > /usr/lib/polkit-1/polkit-agent-helper-1 is suid root, and I was > curious > on the reasoning beyond this.
The agent's job is to tell the polkit daemon "yes, this is definitely Alad, and not someone else who has sat down at Alad's computer". This means it wants to be uid 0 for two reasons: * to be able to run the PAM stack to check your password, one-time key, fingerprint or whatever other credentials against system authentication services * to be able to send that message to the polkit daemon, and give the polkit daemon a reason to believe it (that reason being "it came from uid 0") Regards, S _______________________________________________ polkit-devel mailing list polkit-devel@lists.freedesktop.org https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/polkit-devel