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

[John Myers <electronerd@monolith3d.com>]

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Joerg Schilling wrote:
| 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.

I wasn't trying to insult cdrecord, or even suggest it might have the
inkling of a possibility of this type of issue, and I am sorry if I made
it sound that way. I was merely trying to illustrate a use of my
proposal. I admit, I should have invented a name, like
cd-burning-fire-toaster-program to illustrate the separation of my
example from any actual existing implementation

| What I however see is that a completely unneeded incompatible
interface change
| has been applied to a _stable_ Kernel.

I really wasn't talking about that. I was, however, trying to offer a
solution that would, perhaps, allow both this change, and cdrecord, to
co-exist peacefully, without running cdrecord as root.

|
| 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
|

Which is exactly what I proposed...


So... could anyone comment on my proposal, rather than just flame my
examples?

- --
electronerd (jonathan s myers)
code poet and recycle bin monitor
programmer, monolith3d.com
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