Since each of these functions already enforces guardrails required to keep the OS safe, what is the motivation to have the mode set to 0700 instead of the more permissive 0755 ?
As you said, it would do no good for normal users to run these programs, so there's no point in giving them the necessary permissions. To me it serves as useful metadata: "this binary is only meant to be used by root" - permissions on the binary itself have always felt like a better indicator to me than location in /bin or /sbin. -- Laurent
