Re: (was: Re: PATCH: cdrecord: avoiding scsi device numbering for ide devices)

[Joerg Schilling <schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de>]

John Myers <electronerd@monolith3d.com> wrote:

> I hope this is not a stupid idea:
>
> I propose a finer-grained approach to suid-root binaries. Perhaps, 
> instead of having a single flag giving the binary all the rights and 
> responsibilities of its owner, there could be a table/list/something of 
> capabilities which we want to grant to the binary. This, of course, 
> would be a privileged operation (perhaps a new capability?).
>
> For example, we might want to grant cdrecord CAP_SYS_RAWIO. This way, we 
> don't have to worry about cdrecord running as root and not dropping all 
> the capabilities it doesn't need, by accident or by malice.

cdrecord neither does drop the privileges by accident nor by malice.
What I however see is that a completely unneeded incompatible interface change 
has been applied to a _stable_ Kernel.

On a cleanly designed OS with fine grained permissions, a program like cdrecord
does not need to worry about the permissions as it gets exactly the needed 
permissions granted by the execution environment.

Jörg

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