Re: Closing a privilege escalation

[Davis Herring <herring@lanl.gov>]

> With some arguments, emacs started inside sudo will run the user's own
> .emacs file rather than root's.  This creates a known vulnerability
> for privilege escalation.

How does .emacs allow additional access?  Anyone who can run emacs as 
root can run anything as root (via M-!, among many many other 
possibilities that cannot be countered by noexec).

>    For sudo-authorized users, require .emacs (and other Emacs startup
>    files and directories) to be owned by root.
> 
> This won't be a big hassle for them, since
> these users can sudo to edit their root-owned files.
>  > Do people see any problem with this?
It could easily be a problem if, say, .emacs is under version control. 
It might also interfere with backup systems, and could be incompatible 
with home directories mounted in special ways (e.g., NFS).

Davis

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