FS#65401 - Separation of privileges and reducing the use of root in pacman

Attached to Project: Pacman
Opened by Eli Schwartz (eschwartz) - Friday, 07 February 2020, 01:11 GMT
Task Type Feature Request
Category Backend/Core
Status Unconfirmed
Assigned To No-one
Architecture All
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version 5.2.1
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 0%
Votes 8
Private No

Details

A useful tool for reducing the scope of security bugs would be to do fewer things as root. As suggested in https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2020-February/024030.html

For example if the internal downloader and XferCommand were to operate as a separate user e.g. "libalpm", which had write permissions for only /var/cache/pacman/pkg, the following bug would not have been able to write anywhere on the system, and would usually fail with a permission denied error:
https://security.archlinux.org/CVE-2019-9686

The command injections in these bugs could similarly have avoided being able to run command injection *as root*, greatly reducing the scope of the damage they could do:
https://security.archlinux.org/CVE-2019-18182
https://security.archlinux.org/CVE-2019-18183
This task depends upon

Comment by TJ (boogiepop) - Wednesday, 19 February 2020, 02:34 GMT
Definitely need this.

Loading...