From: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
To: emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Closing a privilege escalation
Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2018 10:55:06 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <89c57a05-b767-23d7-d81f-ee0f1c38c9c2@cs.ucla.edu> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <jwvzi1rdxxx.fsf-monnier+gmane.emacs.devel@gnu.org>
On 04/25/2018 10:09 AM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> $HOME should point to a directory which is only writable
> by users of higher-or-equal privilege-level.
It's not just $HOME, though, right? It's also EMACSLOADPATH, EMACSPATH,
ESHELL, HISTFILE, or anything else specifying where Emacs should get
code or data from or send information to. (Oh, and don't forget my
favorite environment variable TZ. :-) If Emacs is serious about not
trusting sudo, then every file and directory specified by any of these
would need to be vetted.
Also, to be safe shouldn't Emacs check ownership and permissions not
only of each file and directory, but also of all those files' ancestors?
For example, it won't help that /home/whatever is owned by root, if
/home itself is owned by baduser.
And suppose the user is 'eggert' and the directory
/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp (or whatever) is owned by user 'bin' - in
that case, how should Emacs determine that 'bin' is a user of
"higher-or-equal privilege level"?
We do have to be careful of mission creep here. Emacs is supposed to be
a user-level application and setup security is supposed to be sudo's job.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2018-04-25 17:55 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 19+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2018-04-25 1:09 Closing a privilege escalation Richard Stallman
2018-04-25 1:18 ` Noam Postavsky
2018-04-25 22:40 ` Richard Stallman
2018-04-25 1:29 ` Lars Ingebrigtsen
2018-04-25 22:40 ` Richard Stallman
2018-04-26 7:20 ` Lars Ingebrigtsen
2018-04-26 7:52 ` Lars Ingebrigtsen
2018-04-26 21:05 ` Richard Stallman
2018-04-26 21:26 ` Tim Cross
2018-04-27 15:57 ` Richard Stallman
2018-04-27 9:50 ` Marcin Borkowski
2018-04-27 14:29 ` Clément Pit-Claudel
2018-04-25 15:25 ` Davis Herring
2018-04-25 16:47 ` Glenn Morris
2018-04-25 17:09 ` Stefan Monnier
2018-04-25 17:12 ` Stefan Monnier
2018-04-25 17:55 ` Paul Eggert [this message]
2018-04-26 21:01 ` Richard Stallman
2018-04-25 17:10 ` Søren Pilgård
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