You know the things you say make a lot of sense. You are writing it as a criticism, and I'm like "hey not a bad idea at all".
I think you misinterpret people wanting a "back-door". They don't want a back-door, they want a user to be able to install his own software, mostly. Or, they want there to be an intermediate between administrator (root) and regular user, but in Linux land this is a deep schism. This is a wide gap, and enormous split.
You should for fun write a little small script to list all files owned by the various users/groups in your system. You will find that 99% of all files not created by or for a user (ie. user home directory) are all owned by root and virtually nothing else. The files not owned by root, you can count them on about 2 hands.
Unless you have something specific such as www-data or something of the kind.
Just loop through /etc/passwd or /etc/group and do a find for that user or group across the filesystem ex. boundaries (normally) using -xdev.
It might surprise you, just like seeing earth from space (they way they report that).
The thing you mention here is a very valid concern. A true backdoor, of course, would not be. I bicker about constantly about being able to do stuff without being root. I hate having to be root as much as I do. You cannot even normally specify the target for some logging (using syslog) without being root. Doing something as non-root is so unusual that you rather avoid having to choose that. And I can understand that someone might want that.
But that's not, that's nothing like the idiocy that we see today in mostly systemd. That rhymes.
Power management, mobile and firmware developer on Linux. Security developer at Aurora. Ex-biologist. mjg59 on Twitter. Content here should not be interpreted as the opinion of my employer. Also on Mastodon.
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Re: Not surprising
Date: 2016-04-23 01:31 am (UTC)I think you misinterpret people wanting a "back-door". They don't want a back-door, they want a user to be able to install his own software, mostly. Or, they want there to be an intermediate between administrator (root) and regular user, but in Linux land this is a deep schism. This is a wide gap, and enormous split.
You should for fun write a little small script to list all files owned by the various users/groups in your system. You will find that 99% of all files not created by or for a user (ie. user home directory) are all owned by root and virtually nothing else. The files not owned by root, you can count them on about 2 hands.
Unless you have something specific such as www-data or something of the kind.
Just loop through /etc/passwd or /etc/group and do a find for that user or group across the filesystem ex. boundaries (normally) using -xdev.
It might surprise you, just like seeing earth from space (they way they report that).
The thing you mention here is a very valid concern. A true backdoor, of course, would not be. I bicker about constantly about being able to do stuff without being root. I hate having to be root as much as I do. You cannot even normally specify the target for some logging (using syslog) without being root. Doing something as non-root is so unusual that you rather avoid having to choose that. And I can understand that someone might want that.
But that's not, that's nothing like the idiocy that we see today in mostly systemd. That rhymes.