Date: Tue, 26 May 2015 13:55:37 +0200
From: Natanael Copa <ncopa@alpinelinux.org>
To: William Pitcock <nenolod@dereferenced.org>
Cc: alpine-devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: Re: [alpine-devel] 3.3 proposal: reduce number of SUID binaries as
 much as possible
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On Tue, 26 May 2015 04:32:01 -0500
William Pitcock <nenolod@dereferenced.org> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I would like to see a general reduction of SUID binaries where
> possible.  For example, a lot of APKBUILDs have options=suid when
> there's probably no real reason for it.

yes. i'd love to clean up this.

> 
> Examples include ...
> 
>     main/apache2
>     main/atop
>     main/email2trac
>     main/fping
>     main/fuse
>     main/haserl
>     main/krb5
>     main/mailx
>     main/man (i have no idea why you need SUID to view manpages???)

!!!?

lets purge it. mdoc-ml is there. i think there is also a mandb or
something from GNU.


>     main/mate-applets (why would we ever give a GUI defacto root???)
>     main/nagios-plugins
>     main/vte
>     main/xscreensaver

I suspect many of them needs major refactoring for fixing it properly.
For example, kernel now has support for icmp echo without root, but i
have not been able to make it work. you need refactor the ping applications.

IIRC fping tries open the socket with SOCK_DGRAM and fall back to
SOCK_RAW (which requires root). I think this works on OSX, but to make
it work on linux you need refactor lots of other stuff too.

> We should really investigate why these packages need suid and then fix
> the problems.  I guess they want read or write access to some
> filesystem path that is normally hidden.  In this case, we should fix
> the filesystem so that we're not hiding junk we don't need to.
> Security by obscurity isn't.

Yes. we should try fix as many as possible.

> 
> William
> 
> 
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