Hello Robie, thanks for flagging this for review. It's been a few years since I reviewed the first of these cloud-provider agents; I strongly disliked it because it was a route to root execution with basically no oversight possible within the VM, and I think in those days they may not have even bothered with hashes of scripts that were delivered to execute.
(I also much preferred the route taken by Joyent's agent to use a serial port for communication between the guest and the hosting infrastructure; that made it way easier to restrict which processes on the computer could interact with the hosting infrastructure.) I was eventually swayed by a few thoughts: - First, the cloud providers have an incentive to at least be decent: if their agent were terrible, users would run to their competitors. - Second, users could use such orchestration services to coordinate security updates, auditing, lifecycle management, etc across a disparate fleet, while still allowing their owning teams relatively wide freedom. - Third, I didn't want Ubuntu to be an "odd duck out" on the platforms: if RHEL, SLES, and Windows can all be managed through a single management pane or service, but Ubuntu could not be, this might cause problems for wider use of Ubuntu. - Fourth, "console access" is hand-waving basically root anyway, historically speaking. Modify the kernel command line to include "init=/bin/bash" and PAM configuration isn't very relevant. (Confidential Computing may change this, Measured Boot to unlock FDE may change this; I don't know enough about either.) I believe that every agent has been allowed with the restriction from the Ubuntu Security Team that it is only allowed to be installed by default on the respective clouds. (It probably doesn't even need to be requested, but better be clear.) This way users can vote in the marketplace if one or another of the various cloud agents is appalling. I skimmed the notes that Chlo prepared (in a private bug) and it all felt similar to what we've seen from this family of packages in the past: enough to discourage some broad classes of problems but nowhere near the chain of custody that we get with APT. It's unfortunate but it does drastically simplify the use of these services. Thanks -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2164943 Title: [SRU][FFE] Please update to version 20260819.00 To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/google-guest-agent/+bug/2164943/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
