Closing a privilege escalation

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

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.

I propose a feature to fix the vulnerability:

  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?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See https://stallman.org/skype.html.