I found an alternative implementation that doesn't rely in being a setuid binary like systemd-run0 much more interesting from a security perspective, but I am no security expert.
You can enforce a boundary between root and an account that never elevates though. And as far as I understand hardening sudo helps with that.
Maybe you can't realistically do it on Linux, because Linux doesn't care about desktop security and doesn't have the kind of privileged GUI that you need.
* Privileged gui to display and approve what will run as you mentioned. In Linux, non-privileged gui is used to request permission to do... something.
* Executable verification. Let's say someone with user level permissions swaps out the program you wanted to run for a malicious one. The replacement would not pass certificate checks which would be revealed in the privileged gui. Maybe you could supply an old version with known vulnerabilities though idk?
* Kinda commandline parameters verification. In Linux-land you can pass parameters to the program those could be intercepted with user-level permissions. In Windows this would be displayed in the privileged gui. However! The parameters are only visible if you click "show more" which I would guess <1% of people actually do.
As an example of the last point I tested making a shortcut to cmd.exe and used Run As Administrator. Then I changed the shortcut to C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c calc and again did Run As Administrator. Opens calculator instead of command prompt with identical approval gui (except with show more).
It can't be enforced on Linux because `sudo` can be trivially MitM'd, but you can't do that on Windows because it's just a click.
Being a setuid binary means that sudo also suffers from attacks where an attacker runs `sudo ./malware` and then convinces the user to authenticate
That's why the OP said that's not an enforceable security boundary. If the user is capable of attaining superuser privs, you can trick them, regardless of how attaining those privs is implemented.
I didn't interpret OP's comment like that. I think he was saying you can't enforce the boundary at all even if users don't get tricked.
That's true on Linux because the sudo UI can trivially be MitM'd by malware. You can't do that on Windows so trivially.
[0] https://cyberdom.blog/abusing-the-windows-update-stack-to-ga...
So stop doing that!
Going back to the topic of the discussion, making sudo more resilient prevents a whole class of possible bugs (see CVE-2021-3156). You may not like sudo, but it is very commonly used to manage access, prevent accidental errors, or improve accountability on Linux servers and workstations. It is not going away. Therefore, improving sudo is a worthwhile goal and a thing to be celebrated.
>sudo more resilient prevents a whole class of possible bugs
Good, but this doesn't fix the easiest way to escalate privileges as an attacker through sudo. Memory safety doesn't help people who run "curl | sudo bash" to install a random program from the internet.
>It is not going away.
But if work is done it could become very niche and eventually stop getting new usage over time.
I don't think you can help those people, unless you seriously lock down the machine to the level of iPhone. Neither Android nor Windows have "sudo" for example, and yet they can get malware just fine... all the difference is instead of the password, user clicks on confirm button a few times.
I advice to (1) think about how you use sudo (2) think what would you replace it with and (3) think how the replacement can be abused by malware.
Here is one example:
(1) Today I used "sudo" to run docker: "sudo -Eg docker docker run..."
(2) the sudo-less replacement would be to add myself to docker group, or switch to rootless docker
(3) If I add myself to docker group, malware can trivially escalate by starting a privileged container. If I switch to the rootless docker, I am weakening security boundary between my primary user and the docker containers I run.
In text format, all-caps or the use of an exclamation mark are often used to indicate shouting.
So, it is not unreasonable for people to read your sentence as such.
Unless you mean something like "capabilities are always inherited, and there is no way to increase them", which would mean that sudo-like scripts are impossible, and you need to start all-new session as root user for admin actions. Good news, it's already possible in linux - just don't install "sudo", and maybe set up SELinux to disallow all escalation. Turns out no one wants to do this though.
there's no god-mode who can do everything. there's no universal kernel level. micro means only minimal things happen in the kernel or at root level, like routing messages.
even windows understood that those times, when they did split Administrator from System. linux followed then with system users for certain services. but capabilities only allow certain calls at certain times. there's no setuid 0, only cap this and cap that for this admin user for a certain time range.
BTW, SElinux is the default on a proper linux like Redhat. I use it daily. I also have to adjust the ssh caps, not just the firewall settings. Everybody wants that, just not the debian nobs.
An agent logically has all the capabilities necessary to do what the agent should be able to do. The sum of capabilities of an agent indicates "the worst that can happen" if the agent is malicious. It makes sense that if a network service is malicious, all networking activities can be subverted. Still, the storage activities shouldn't be subverted, and of course the network service wouldn't have the storage service capability. However, if a user is malicious, anything could go wrong that the user is normally trusted to not make go wrong. Correspondingly, the user must have an expansive sum of capabilities.
Capabilities are themselves simple, but that is the mechanism perspective. Access control policy is an entirely different beast, and any mechanism at best minimizes the risks.
However, were were talking about "sudo" and this is purely interactive tool (I am sure some people run sudo non-interactively, but we can all agree it's a bad security practice). So, how does this nice capabilities vision mesh with the idea of "administrator user"?
From what I see, it's not much different. Instead of "sudo" which verifies user identity+permissions and then gives out "root" or some other user, we have some other hypothetical tool ("become-admin"?) which verifies user identity+permission and gives out powerful system-changing capabilities. Frankly, I don't see much difference - it's the same security model either way.
(A related argument I've seen is "you should not need sudo for common tasks like update software or configure network" - but on modern Linuxes, you don't need sudo for that already, this is done via dbus + polkit calls. No "proper microkernels" required, that is already deployed everywhere.)
It doesn't need to be possible.
>change system configurations
You can have an settings app to configure the system.
>then you have Android
Which is much farther ahead than Ubuntu on security. Ubuntu needs to play catch up.
>but then you have certainly not enabled everything a user can do with sudo.
The goal is not to be able to do everything. The average user doesn't need to be able to do anything. Especially with their regular account.
Anybody who finds themselves using sudo is already well off the beaten path, by their own choice. There's nothing wrong with that.
The beaten path is the defaults. Windows and MacOS particularly.
* The user may never perform the action (would require sudo, but the user doesn't have sudo rights)
* The user may sometimes perform the action (i.e. only after authenticating with sudo)
* The user may always perform the action (is always implicitly authenticated)
"Being root" is just another name for the last option.
What fourth alternative do you have in mind?
No, it's not. Take for example ping. If we want users to be able to always be able to use ping does that mean they need to be root? No, it doesn't. A privileged part of the OS can handle doing the raw socket and the unpriviledged user can talk to that part of the OS.
The key point is that some operations that require privileges are okay to expose to a user, but giving the user privileges for everything is dangerous.
And it's also why it mostly has not happened for most people.
>If it was provided by a daemon, built into systemd, or anything else
Yes, this is also dangerous.
So does your OS.
I think the main benefit of eliminating setuid binaries is that you can forbid them system-wide (e.g. via mount flags), as a hardening measure.
The original unix process abstraction was extremely simple; the entire spec is a few pages.
The problem is that Linux keeps adding more and more levels of Rube Goldberg machine to its security model, so now literally no one understands how a default minimal install of, say, Ubuntu works.
Adding a magic daemon that runs stuff as root to this pile of complexity probably won’t help. Ripping out almost all the cruft that’s accumulated over the years, and adding back something sane (maybe BSD jails) would work a lot better.
The non-daemon has to parse just as much in addition to making itself secure. Actually it needs to parse more things in more complex ways.
Here’s a simple implementation: https://github.com/TheMilkies/rut/blob/main/rut.c
(Though it doesn’t clear the environment unless I’m missing something - they should probably replace the call to execvp with one to execvpe, and add a null pointer to the end of the argument list).
The problem of setting up root’s environment and parsing the command line is left to the shell in both solutions (the thing I linked doesn’t indirect through a root login shell).
There’s also the config file, but that’s the same for both.
Similarly, the system could be running some SEL derivative or be using a capability system that causes non-standard behavior from system calls, but the daemon has the same problem.
So yes, I am not saying that privilege escalation bugs are impossible if you have a different architecture, but like Lennart argues is that it makes them much more difficult to happen, especially because creating a proper setuid is difficult. Also there is a bunch of things that makes sudo especially tricky to implement correctly.
Eventually the bug (and associated vulnerability) was patched. I think.
I apologize, I do not bookmark these issues, but maybe I should start doing that? In any case, you will find logic bugs which may raise the question "is it really worth the rewrite?".
> I apologize, I do not bookmark these issues, but maybe I should start doing that?
Yes. If you want to point out problems, it really helps if you can point at specifics.
> In any case, you will find logic bugs which may raise the question "is it really worth the rewrite?".
There's a cost/benefit question, but note that the mere presence of some bugs doesn't make a rewrite worthless.
Ubuntu continuously updates itself without permission, killing apps and losing previous state. You have the Javascript based Gnome window manager that is always bugging out. The Ubuntu packages, drivers and kernel are laughably behind Debian and even further behind mainline. Ubuntu continues to morph into something I don't believe in.
That all said, Rust is not a smoking gun for incorrect application logic. It could still happily incorrectly execute stuff with the wrong permissions or blow something up badly. I think it's also a bad idea to offer it as a drop-in replacement when clearly features are still missing since a long time [1].
[1] https://github.com/trifectatechfoundation/sudo-rs/issues?pag...
This side steps the issue which is "Does Rust help you make software more correct?" No one is arguing that Rust is perfect. There are plenty of bugs in my Rust software. The question is only -- are we better off with Rust than the alternatives?
> I think it's also a bad idea to offer it as a drop-in replacement when clearly features are still missing since a long time [1].
Your example is the Github issue page?
Look -- I agree that, say, uutils/coreutils missing locales may frustrate some users (although I almost never use them). But "close enough" is more the Unix way than we may care to realize. But especially in this instance, because sudo is not POSIX (unlike locales which are). A distro is free to choose any number of alternatives.
Ubuntu wants to lay claim to "the Rust distribution" and it's hard to blame them when Linux wants to lay claim to "the Rust kernel".
Entirely untrue. It may happen, but there is zero consensus to port Linux to rust. Not even the tiniest bit.
... But I did not say there was a consensus to port Linux to Rust? I'm sorry you misunderstood.
Now, why would Linux want to lay claim to being 'the Rust kernel' and how is that different than Linux being rewritten in Rust? I believe that there are many reasons why Linus chose to give Rust for Linux a chance. I believe at least one of those reasons is mindshare. If Linux chose not to experiment with Rust drivers, then that mindshare might go somewhere else.
>> Ubuntu wants to lay claim to "the Rust distribution"
Notice, Ubuntu is doing a similar thing. Canonical isn't porting all of Ubuntu to Rust. It is picking and choosing bits which they can, and would like, to move to Rust. Why? Probably for similar reasons. They want to seen as friendly to the Rust mindshare.
This isn't a thing. Linux isn't laying claim to any such assertion.
If you want to know Linus's reasons, then read the LKML. He's quite open in all of his thoughts in this regard, and it has nothing to do with labeling Linux 'the Rust kernel'.
I don't know if this is some weird sort of advocacy, or you're just listening to a lot of over the top rust people, but nothing you're saying here is real.
Again, very sorry you misunderstood me. However, I am now pretty certain one of your difficulties is that you stop short of reading my next sentence, and then my next sentence after that. See my quoted comments above. I made very clear these are strictly my beliefs.
> If you want to know Linus's reasons, the read the LKML.
Perhaps when I said "I believe" I was being too subtle about what "my beliefs" are or what "beliefs" mean.
I hope you would agree -- just because one has expressed certain technical reasons/desires does not mean that there were not any unexpressed social reasons/desires, or what philosophers also call "higher order volitions" (long term volitions, or volitions about volitions), for one's actions.
Now -- I do not know but I do believe there may be social reasons for Rust being adopted in the Linux kernel, because I have read the LKML and I have reasoned about why Linux is experimenting with Rust drivers from things Linus and others have said.
Feel free to disagree, of course, but, in the future, please make more of an effort to avoid mischaracterizing me again.
Drop the "mischaracterising" routine. You're asserting specific things, so expect to get challenged when they're nonsense.
If I said "Coca Cola wants to lay claim to being the best cola soda in the world", I'm sure you would also say to me: "Patently untrue. Where exactly in Coca Cola's public statements are we to find that statement?!", instead of, perhaps reflecting, and asking yourself -- is that a reasonable belief for one to hold, given Coca Cola's marketing?
If I am not conforming to your expectations, perhaps it is because your expectations that need a reset.
You stated this as fact, as an active statement and goal. It isn't. At all. It's made up fantasy.
Trying to reframe things after, by changing that statement into "oh, that's just an idea I had!" and then blaming others, is invalid and dishonest.
You seem to want to blame others for your made up, untrue statements being challenged. Give it a rest. Your attempts to blame shift will gain no traction here.
You stated something as fact that is not. You were wrong to do so. You are wrong to blame me for pointing it out. You are wrong to continue complaining.
You are wrong.
Clear?
Ugh. Well, I suppose it must seem very unfair to live a life without the benefit of figurative language and/or subtextual meaning. Know that I'm praying for a cure.
Good luck sir or ma'am!
You've now crafted multiple lies, over your muktiple replies, to explain away your untrue statements. This too is wrong.
There is a lot of embedded knowledge in existing implementations, Rust deals with just one small class of bugs but drops a lot of this knowledge in the process.
I would generally be in favour of just introducing better memory management to C/C++ and hard enforcing it in particular repositories.
Agree. The question whether to rewrite and/or whether to use any new implementation should take this fact into account.
> Rust deals with just one small class of bugs but drops a lot of this knowledge in the process.
Hard disagree. Rust explicitly deals with several very important classes of bugs (memory safety and concurrency), and also aids correctness via other helpful design features like tagged unions and immutability by default. But Rust, the language, does not drop any knowledge in the process, though any decision to rewrite in any language may drop some knowledge, and/or may create new bugs, in the process.
> I would generally be in favour of just introducing better memory management to C/C++ and hard enforcing it in particular repositories.
This is really easy to say, but in practice it just hasn't worked out, and there is loads of empirical evidence to back that up.[0] It is not as if market incentives don't exist to create better C/C++ code.[1] If you have a way to do it better, I have no doubt Google, half a dozen other hyper-scalers, and the US government will pay you handsomely for your solution. But, at this point in time, if this is the solution, I'm afraid it's time to put up or shut up.
[0]: https://www.usenix.org/conference/enigma2021/presentation/ga... [1]: https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/translating-all-c-to...
It really wasn't too difficult to get high reliability for memory management in C/C++ which is also concurrency safe (I have active projects running for years like this). The difficulty was enforcing it so that you are reduced to a subset of the language and it has to be followed with discovery at compile time.
The trap I'm concerned we are falling into is the "just re-write the C/C++ project in Rust". I still believe the solution is in enforcing better practices at compile time.
It does default to installing security updates automatically. However, this is completely configurable.
It isn't reasonable to have different default behaviour - otherwise the majority of users would be vulnerable from a security perspective.
If you want different behaviour, just configure it as you wish.
> The Ubuntu packages, drivers and kernel are laughably behind Debian and even further behind mainline.
This just isn't a reasonable description of reality.
Unless you're referring to an Ubuntu LTS, in which case, of course it is: that's the entire point of Ubuntu LTS, and Ubuntu users have the choice of using the six monthly non-LTS releases if they want more up-to-date packages, which Debian users do not have.
Man, but have you personally tried to disable it?
Did you stop apt-daily.service apt-daily.time apt-daily-upgrade.service and apt-daily.timer? Did you repeat the same but masking and disabling those services. Don't forget to repeat that for unatended-upgrades.service. Even after that whenever our CI fails an apt-get we have a pstree output to figure out what other dark pattern canonical came up with.
This whole debacle made me consider RedHat for my next install, and I use Ubuntu for almost 2 decades. It became unreliable in servers.
Dont get me started on the lack of security updates on "multiverse" packages which starts to include more and more packages and thus LTS means less and less. This is not innocent but so you buy Ubuntu One.
I'm personally moving to Debian. It's 99% how Ubuntu used to be and most Ubuntu stuff is just a .deb that is relatively compatible.
Sure. It's just a one line change in the configuration file (/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades). Or, if you're doing a mass deployment, just don't install the unattended-upgrades package.
> figure out what other dark pattern canonical came up with
The mechanism is inherited from Debian. It isn't Canonical's architecture.
If you want to hack internals to do things in a more complicated way, then that's up to you, but you can't then complain that it's unnecessarily complicated.
That answer shows you have not seen that pattern fail.When that fails or is overwritten by an update, remember my comment.
Ironically you just added another way to configure a simple thing, proving my point.
A better default behaviour would be to alert the user and allow them to choose to indefinitely defer by "accepting the risk". Some setups, rightfully or wrongfully, have a very long running time and cannot be restarted.
> If you want different behaviour, just configure it as you wish.
I'm not sure if it changed, but they made it extremely difficult on purpose. You can stop snap from updating, but then lots of other things also break.
> This just isn't a reasonable description of reality.
It's my experience with packages I use.
That would be terrible UX and is exactly contrary to Ubuntu's philosophy, which is to do the right thing by default.
The alternative is to bombard the user with questions that they're generally not in a position to understand, and force them to receive an education on stuff that doesn't matter to most users before they can use their computer.
Even in Windows (or at least it used to be), the decision to perform an update now was a user decision. Just killing off applications without warning is the worst UX ever. Randomly killing stuff off is the opposite of what I want my OS doing.
> The alternative is to bombard the user with questions that they're generally not in a position to understand, and force them to receive an education on stuff that doesn't matter to most users before they can use their computer.
It doesn't have to be like that. It could be: "Do you want to update now? The following programs are affected and will be restarted: X, Y, Z. [Learn more]" The answers could be "Yes", "Remind me on next boot", "Remind me later" (offers common delays, i.e. 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week).
What is should never do is take the power away from a user. I saw an Ubuntu user's system restart their snap programs in the middle of delivering a conference presentation without warning. That was the worst way that could have been handled.
It's been years since they added warnings for upcoming snap updates. There's also "refresh awareness", which defers updates (to a limit, with warnings before exceeding the limit) while a user is using an app.
Even with your explanation I don't think it fits here.
There's no valid reason cyber security people would take a well known idiom and repurpose it as you imply, and a quick Google suggests they haven't done this.
What? Is this some snap thing because apt sure as hell doesn't do this without you configuring it explicitly.
There's no control of when snaps update, Ubuntu has explicitly said they will never add this.
There was no way to disable snap auto-updates until just last year(-ish?) when Firefox finally announced they would no longer support snaps and started telling people how to tear them out and replace them with native packages or Flatpaks. Low-and-behold, Ubuntu suddenly got the feature to disable automatic snap updates. After saying explicitly they would never allow it for years, and telling high-uptime users to instead block snap daemon network access via the firewall to avoid it.
The bigger problem is upgrading packages deliberately but being surprised by the results. My team's current favorite is the upgrade process itself suddenly having new interactive prompts breaking our scripts.
This is how dpkg and apt have worked in Debian and Ubuntu pretty much since their inception. Look into debconf, dpkg and ucf configuration to learn how to integrate these with your automation. The mechanisms for this have existed for decades now and have not substantially changed in that time.
If you're installing software from Debian/Ubuntu repos, you can only use aptitude or apt to my knowledge. Other tools give you the ability to install DEB files you already have, and manage what's on your system currently. And aptitude and apt are both well known for never having had a "stable" scriptable interface. In fact they themselves tell you that their commands are not stable and should not be used for scripting, despite no alternative mode or application existing.
Recently Ubuntu moved to apt 3 as well, which massively overhauled the tool from apt 2. All those scripts people wrote to use apt 2 (because there was no alternative) broke recently when they now had to use apt 3.
> In fact they themselves tell you that their commands are not stable and should not be used for scripting, despite no alternative mode or application existing.
No, that's just the apt command, not the apt-get command, and the manpage for apt tells you exactly how to do this instead. It's clearly documented, so your "despite no alternative mode or application existing" claim is simply ignorant.
Please read the documentation and learn how to use the tooling before criticizing it and misleading others with claims that are outright wrong.
I've never seen this happen and I've run Ubuntu in production for years. Apt does not auto-update unless it's configured for unattended upgrades — and both Debian and Ubuntu allow you to configure unattended upgrades in apt. And unattended upgrades via apt should not kill running user processes or cause data loss.
The Ubuntu packages, drivers, and kennel are laughably behind Debian.
This is just plain wrong — even for the steelman argument of Debian unstable or testing, which are not intended for general use. Debian unstable and testing are on kernel 6.12. Ubuntu 25.04 is on kernel 6.14.
Debian stable, meanwhile, is on 6.1. Ubuntu has the far more-recent kernel.
I don't know what you mean by "drivers" — there aren't separate drivers on Linux from the kernel; they're shipped in the kernel. Ubuntu's are also more recent than Debian, since the kernel version is more recent.
With respect to packages, obviously I can't check every package version, but e.g. coreutils in Ubuntu are on 9.5, released in March 2024; systemd on Ubuntu is a version released this year (and until last month Debian unstable and Ubuntu were identical); gcc is identical; etc. While Ubuntu occasionally lags Debian unstable, it's not by much.
If you compare to actual Debian stable, it's not even close. Debian stable is ancient.
And ultimately... Why are you using Debian unstable? It's called "unstable" for a reason. It receives basically no testing. Even the "testing" version is more stable, and that's not intended to be stable at all and doesn't necessarily receive security updates. Ubuntu is less-stable than Debian stable, but far more up-to-date; Debian testing is less-stable than Ubuntu... And usually still not even as up-to-date. Debian unstable is basically untested; if you want that you'd be better served by a rolling release distro like Arch where the packages are going to be way more up-to-date anyway.
The Debian wiki cautions against treating unstable or testing releases as general purpose, so I truly don't think even this steelman is viable. [1] In fact, they refuse to even call Debian unstable a "release" since there are no release practices associated with it and the code is effectively untested.
Ubuntu is nowhere near my favorite Linux distro, but claiming it's more out of date than Debian is just FUD.
Debian is very very stable — at least, Debian stable is — and people love it for that. But the tradeoff is that everything in it is ancient. If you want something that's like Debian, but more up-to-date but slightly less stable — that's Ubuntu. If you want a rolling release, that's Arch. (And of course, there are even more-different distros like NixOS or ostree-based ones; there's the Red Hat universe of RHEL and the closer-to-bleeding-edge Fedora; etc etc.) Using Debian unstable is either a magnanimous act of sacrifice in order to help test future Debian versions, or it's self-harm.
Personally if I wanted to use a Debian-derivative on the desktop, though, I'd probably use System76's PopOS, which is basically a cleaned-up Ubuntu with some nice GNOME extensions. I'm more curious in the future to try out ostree-based distros, though, like the various Fedora Atomic ones, since they have nice rollbacks without the user-facing complexity of NixOS.
I tried the latest Ubuntu and it seems to be targeted at either containers or desktops. Everything I wanted to set up networking wise was a pain for my little non standard configuration.
Ended up wiping it and installing Debian instead.
As for this Rust thing, first question that comes to my mind is what features are missing from this new godly impervious to hackers by default implementation.
Ubuntu seems to find it necessary to always invent some new way of doing a standard thing. Like how they use netplan for networking, a tool they invented themselves for a task that already has industry standard options available, is missing basic features those alternatives have, and adds nothing the alternatives don't also have (including any better usability). They do this all the time, and have to eventually be dragged into the modern era when they finally get sick of having no community support for their one-off inferior tool.
In particular I'm just waiting for snaps to finally die. But at least that has some technical possibilities the alternatives don't, they just aren't functionally available in snaps yet. In another 20 years, if Ubuntu keeps at it with their unconfigurable, hardcoded, private snap registry and slow limited advancement snap portals-equivalent implementation, they might even have half as much functionality and packaged tools as Flatpak current has today.
---
If you want a decent server, Debian is a better option, even though they have some finnicky choices, and its enough like Ubuntu you might have some cross-ober familiarity. Some of the old standbys like Fedora aren't good options because of their frequent update schedule and lack of long term support, but there are also some very good niche options if you can dig a lot more.
Also worth noting: if you want to keep the server working, you should plan on pretty much everything being in containers. It adds some complexity to what you're doing, but keeps each little experiment isolated from the others and avoids polluting the global system.
One of my former colleagues used to install Ubuntu servers. I replace them with Debian when I get the chance. I was already blacklisted for Snap, so I can't re-blacklist them for going uutils and sudo-rs, and that's sad (as in Bryan Cantrell's famous talk).
Nitpicking, but I thought Android was the most widely deployed Linux OS around...
Bit like how tomato is technically a fruit but everyone knows that in the context of a supermarket it’s a vegtable
What issues did you have with snap packages?
I am not aware of any problems with snap packages.
They have some pretty nice features compared to traditional packages:
https://snapcraft.io/docs/get-started#p-19156-connect-an-int...
If snap packages have caused problems for you, what were the problems?
https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/11/microsoft_azure_ubunt...
If your intention is to not start a flame war, you might want to avoid contraversial topics such as the obviously manufactured canceling of RMS by the-powers-that-be.
Idk, just speculating to maybe get the thought process
There's no "Linux operating system". Linux is the name of the kernel. Android is an operating system, GNU/Linux is, things like BusyBox/Linux are. They're all operating systems that use the Linux kernel.
There's this weird definition of "operating system" which means "some sort of platform with a shell and little commands like cp, ls, etc.". That's just what POSIX tells people an operating system is, not the ultimate truth. It doesn't have to be that way.
Linux is not a Unix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix-like
[1] because it doesn't abstract the hardware platform, doesn't multiplex hardware, nor protect software principals from each other https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36myc8wQhLo&t=8m48s
I don't have a problem with it, specifically. Seems odd that they don't advertise it, though.
In your own comment you mention "actually the best outcome" but that's a matter of politics, doubtless you have different ideas about what "best" would be than I do, and I appreciate that perhaps you've never considered that anybody other than you could be right, but you might want to take a moment to think again.
The point is that they seem to have conflated opinions about what policies are correct for general real-world issues, with those that are specific to the task of programming.
> "No politics" usually means
No; "no politics" usually means "please do not attempt to bring up topics that relate to decisions made by governments, and instead stay focused on topics directly related to the project at hand".
> or at best the small-C conservative idea that the status quo has existed forever and so whatever happens to presently be the case is just how things should be.
I have never understood how this argument makes sense to anyone. Obviously, "changing the status quo" is a policy position in a way that "not changing the status quo" isn't. The argument is effectively that it's impossible to just not care about something, for any given thing. I refute this by noting that an effectively unlimited number of policies can be proposed, yet I am not constantly thinking about politics.
> but that's a matter of politics, doubtless you have different ideas about what "best" would be than I do, and I appreciate that perhaps you've never considered that anybody other than you could be right, but you might want to take a moment to think again.
Again, I can't fathom how this line of argument makes sense to anyone. "Politics" is, quite simply, understood by the overwhelming majority of people in such a way that determining "best outcome" for a computer program not used in any government capacity is obviously not a political matter.
Or else: in your view, what does "should `sudo` do X in Y situation?" have in common with "should country X go to war with country Y?" ?
Everything is political in the same way that everything is offensive and everyone is evil. As in, you're welcome to go around saying that, but don't expect people to find this to be an enlightened perspective.
Tale as old as time.
I genuinely hadn't thought of this point of contention beforehand, but oof he did not care for that.
GNU is nowhere near as dominant in the non-kernel code that people run any longer.
And a lot of the GNU zealots who were particularly interested in getting credit with naming got old.
https://distfiles.gentoo.org/releases/amd64/autobuilds/curre...
That killed most of the “user freedom” enthusiasm of the early days. These days, there’s the AGPL, but that’s mostly used like the BSL (“if you want to use AGPL in production, pay us”), than for bootstrapping freedom-respecting compute environments.
If you disagree, show me an AGPL userland that’s appropriate for daily-driving.
I’m slowly migrating off Linux to the BSDs these days. The politics seem less destructive to the user experience with them.
Can't you already do anything you want to GPL code locally?
By letting cloud services that use GPL software stay closed source it actively encourages development of cloud based tooling in a commercial context and users end up getting forced to sign up with and connect to a closed source cloud service they have even less control over than traditional locally running closed source software.
I think Stallmans motivation for the FSF includes a story about modifying a driver for a printer to support new features. Now imagine if that printer had a cloud based interface and imagine how the GPL would help Stallman add features for a new printer to it. It doesn't, if he wanted to fix the interface he would have to reverse engineer it from scratch. 40 years of FSF and it lets a decades old trend run circles around its goals.
This is why AGPL was invented. You might use my AGPL code in your cloud service, but you need to provide the source code you are running to your clients. You are not allowed to keep any secret sauce secret from your users.
MIT and BSD (and plain GPL) don’t protect users again abuses like this.
V3 is incompatible with selling bootloader locked software stacks (pretty much all consumer hardware these days).
Concretely, I can’t do this local thing: Take GPLv3 software, build a board, link the software to vendor blob firmware (~ all current hardware requires this step), flash it to a ROM on the board and sell it to you with a copy of the GPLv3 software’s source code.
I can take the same vendor blob, add a TCP stack, and have your device shell into a copy of GPLv3 software with closed source modifications running in my data center.
This has massive negative consequences for users of GPLv3-reliant IoT crap and cloud services.
Which is great. It prevents enshitification of consumer devices.
But their argument is that blocking that loophole, while not blocking an even worse loophole, caused more harm than good.
In other words we should have moved as much as possible directly to AGPL, and left the rest on GPLv2.
It is only "religious" if you think it in such a way.
I'd say the amount of skepticism (rather than valid criticism) has been no less than enthusiam in the community.
As the saying goes, there are two kinds of languages...
This is why so many Linux developers resists the addition of Rust or C++.
Yeah. I too, hate the Rust Evangelically Orthodox Later Day Christians.
Oh, wait... You're serious. What is religious about rewriting tools in Rust? Isn't that what most programmers do for fun and learning?
Is it any more religious than worshiping Alan Kay or Dijkstra?
> It makes me wonder how much is motivated by stuff other than what’s actually the best outcome.
Looks in the thread... Sees https://www.sudo.ws/security/advisories/
Are you sure the status quo is the better outcome?
"Religious" isn't being used to refer to people rewriting tools in Rust.
It's used to refer to people zealously commenting on message boards that every single tool ever built should be rewritten in Rust, and if you aren't rewriting your tool in Rust, you're an idiot.
Ok, but between me, GP and the article, who said that? Where are the Rabid RIIR fans?
And before you misquote me, I said, why wouldn't you rewrite stuff in Rust, if the status quo is ridden with bugs, and safety issues? And why shouldn't a Linux distro switch to it if they desire.
The person you replied to said: "The religious element of rust programmers seems more extreme than other languages."
You interpreted that in a way that ended up with you asking "What is religious about rewriting tools in Rust".
I clarified that the typical way "religious element of rust programmers" is interpreted is not the act of rewriting tools, but the proselytizing about rust on message boards. I then gave an example of what that proselytizing typically looks like (which was not a claim that you said something like that).
That is the "religious element" being referred to. The proselytizing is the religious element, not the act of rewriting tools in Rust.
(The meme "Rust Evangelists" didn't manifest out of thin air because people hate memory safety or whatever -- it's because people are really, really passionate about Rust, and are vocal about that passion)
Ok. Where is the proselytizing taking place in the article?
Is the sudo-rs did work, the proselytization? Where is it?
> The meme "Rust Evangelists" didn't manifest out of thin air
That's not how memes work. It's just something that appeals to some group that spreads it. It can be true, false and fabricated out of thin air.
What if I told you, that "What if I told you" meme isn't what Morpheus says to Neo? The scene itself is so divorced from meme it doesn't carry much resemblance (here https://youtu.be/L8H9DqkrkcY)
It's not? It's like you're picking random words out of my comment to quote without bothering to read what I'm writing. Nothing of what I said is about the article. It's about your misinterpretation of what fossuser meant when they said "religious element".
I can't explain the same thing for a third (fourth, I guess? since I just tried again) time, I'm running out of different ways to say it. So I'll just leave it there.
Your meta-commentary on memes is neat and all, but again, somehow, completely misses the point I was making.
My point, where is the proof of that "religious element" beyond memes? Is it in the article? Is it in the links? Where can we see this religious fervor in action?
The article is very matter of fact. I expect people to be matter of fact as well.
I swear to God, I feel like I'm asking for the Individualist Eleven book, and everyone asserts me it exists, and they read it, but no one can ever finds it.
> Your meta-commentary on memes is neat and all, but again, somehow, completely misses the point I was making.
It's necessary because memes aren't real. They might have started based on some interactions that 10 years ago, but by their nature they will mutate and twist.
You can argue with fossuser about the validity of what they said.
I'll offer my opinion, which is not some proof from god or anything that you seem to be seeking, which is that I find significantly more annoying comments from Rust users, about how something should be rewritten in Rust to fix everything, than any other language. But, again, this is not proof from god. I'm just a guy making an observation based on my lived experience. You have a different lived experience. Glad we could clear that up.
You know what, you or anyone else can start with actual proofs. I don't want your lived experience and memes as proof, I need messages, posts from people (bonus points for sudo-rs members) that show how zealous they are about Rust and rewriting all the things in it.
I'm a Java dev, that just dabbles in Rust. I've seen observed many claims about Rust zealotry with no actual proof. Whenever I ask for them, I get a blank stare and dodging.
Hence, my comparison with the book from Ghost in the Shell. It, too, was a meme, an actual memory virus. Everyone read it, and no one could find the proof it existed.
Have fun.
(I'm sure if I pick any specific quotes, you'll start arguing the semantics of what is "zealous", how whatever number of comments I pick are outliers, or not proof enough, etc. So, here's one query, of many, that you can pick through.)
In the end, I really could not care less if you agree with the characterization or not. But your enthusiastic defense is fun. If you keep going, you'll be coming close to being an example yourself!
First, a simple grading system: 0 - No RIIR sentiment 1- Joking or 2 - Mentioning Rust in positive light 3 - Suggesting Rust positive light for project 4 - Asking for RIIR, saying stuff like this wouldn't happen in Rust 5 - Demanding RIIR
| | | RIIR grade (0 -> 5) | Notes |
| --- | --------------------------------------------- | ------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------- |
| 1 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43912708 | 4 | Parent post is talking about Rust |
| 2 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43910022 | 0 | Talks about Fish rewrite |
| 3 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43909844 | 0 | Discusses Issues |
| 4 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43909222 | 1 | Jokey on RIIR |
| 5 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43906665 | 0 | Talking about RIIR |
| 6 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43905224 | 0 | Promotes a rewrite in C versus a Rust rewrite |
| 7 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43897309 | 2 | Discusses Rust in positive light, but nothing about rewrite |
| 8 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43865281 | 0 | Discusses negatives of JS backends |
| 9 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43851214 | 0 | Talks about knowledge bias |
| 10 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43851075 | 5 | RIIR (maybe joke) |
| 11 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43840479 | 0 | RIIR is mentioned in passing, not actually used |
| 12 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43833836 | 4 | RIIR suggestion |
| 13 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43832828 | 0 | Advises against Rust |
| 14 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43832638 | 0 | Not RIIR |
| 15 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43832349 | 4 | Asks for RIIR (maybe jokingly) |
| 16 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827713 | 0 | Congratulates on Rewriting in C#/Unity |
| 17 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43797673 | 0 | Neither it nor the GP are acually RIIR |
| 18 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43791746 | 3 | Mentions Rust in positive light |
| 19 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43791093 | 1 | Joke |
| 20 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43791090 | 1 | Joke |
| 21 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43781819 | 2 | Arguments for writing code in Rust |
| 22 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43769094 | 5 | RIIR |
| 23 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43768282 | 0 | Negative on RIIR |
| 24 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43766357 | 0 | Explaining what RIIR means |
| 25 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43766000 | 4 | Asks for RIIR |
| 26 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43764348 | 0 | Discusses implementation in Rust |
| 27 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43757201 | 0 | Talks about Rust |
| 28 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43731538 | 2 | Mentions Rust in positive light |
However actual number of RIIR between 2-5 depending how you look at it, 5-17%. Assuming the rest of pages have a similar spread, and that targeting only keywords of RIIR captures accurately the sentiment - I suspect the latter is the case. I've seen more negativity about Rust in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43910745 in few hours, than positivity about Rust in several days.
And I've seen my comments that are positive about Rust get way more downvoted, than comments skeptical or negative on Rust.
Isn't not advertising a language the polar opposite of being religious about a language?
I am all for a memory safe sudo and I don't care which language it is written in, use C, Ada, Rust, as long as it is a suitable systems programming language understood by a community of developers and you can proof memory safety to an acceptable degree. If the people first to do it in an such an way happen to use Rust, not accepting that based purely on the language is what would sound religious to me..
Maybe this protectionist reaction (see recent drama within the Linux kernel) is every bit as religiously colored as some people claim Rust people are.
I mean memory safety? What comes next? Not allowing us to use after free like true men would? \s
My reply is flagged dead now which is fine since it did create an unproductive thread, but it was more that I had noticed Rust as a community seems to have more of an identity based political bent around it more so than other languages. Something I've also noticed with Mozilla - it's not just the language, but that the language signals you're a certain kind of person with a certain kind of politics in addition to the general pro-rust stuff.
I don't recall seeing this combination elsewhere with other languages before - though there have been religious like battles over languages forever, but I don't think it's been predictive of someone's political identity before?
This is a pretty astounding claim. On which data did you base that conclusion? Because if it is purely anecdotal, you might consider that this is a bit like with Apple fanboys. Apple generally makes good products. Most people who use their stuff don't even talk about it, but those who do talk about it tend to have strong opinions that extend the quality of Apples products themselves.
But these opinions are not even remotely representative of the broad majority of Apple users.
Rust similarily lends itself to fanboyism, because the language has a strong narrative going for it, that is part of its success. The narrative isn't even a bad one: create a programming language that makes certain common classes of mistakes impossible and others much harder. Like every topic with strong narrative this will draw in a certain amount of people who will strongly defend said narrative, but those aren't necessarily the manority of the people who use the language.
So unless you made a proper poll that tries to select for a broad set of Rust users instead of basing your judgment on a loud online minority I wouldn't be confident in the result.
I with "identity based bent" you mean they are inclusive and have strong community rules, it might just be that this is normal where the Rust users are from. Last time I checked Rust was very popular in European countries and over here these kind of rules are pretty off the shelve standard. But please tell me this isn't about you calling them "woke" and confusing basic human dignity with politics.
Tho the extra properties re side channels in said verified code outdoes Rust, so I'd also say it'd be undesirable to replace that C code with Rust
https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/08/the_us_government_wan...
Rust is part of a modernized iteration in language design this century
Nobody is calling for Ada code to be rewritten in Rust. But at this point you'd want an argument to choose Ada over Rust when it has become more widespread, especially in open source projects
Here's someone else's take on your question a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28347930
- Avionics
- ATM
- Space
- Rail
- Automotive
- Defense
- Security
- Medical
https://www.adacore.com/about-ada
You can find lots of resources here to learn Ada / SPARK: https://learn.adacore.com or just to see what is up. Alternatively, there are good blog posts, too.
For years I used a C window manager I wrote which was less than 150 lines[1], it can definitely be a terse language. But I've also written pretty tight Rust code for a card game engine & its http server. I don't think Rust is particularly more verbose. Rust code can be artistic too[2]
1. https://github.com/serprex/nobox/blob/master/nobox.c
2. https://github.com/serprex/Kelxquoia/blob/master/src/main.rs
https://github.com/serprex/nobox/blob/master/nobox.c is definitely terse. :D I get lost just by looking at it; a little bit of refactoring (indentation-wise) would help though.
But why does it matter if the language that has seen some traction in terms of "rewriting software in safer languages" is rust? At that point it becomes even more religious to just reflexively oppose rust because "well why didn't x or y see the same push??"? Again, it really doesn't matter why!
> But why does it matter if the language that has seen some traction in terms of "rewriting software in safer languages" is rust? At that point it becomes even more religious to just reflexively oppose rust because "well why didn't x or y see the same push??"? Again, it really doesn't matter why!
If it does not matter, then why not Ada / SPARK indeed? I am sure the whys matter to some extent.
I did start writing coreutils in Ada but I gave up. :(
Which is obviously false, and I think the novel thing about rust's hype is that it's always compared to C or C++ (instead of java or c#, for example).
I think that's why it feels like it's the only language that is talked about when discussing "memory safety" (even if most mainstream languages are memory safe now). Go had a similar "system lang" hype to it until it was clear that it really wasn't.
Ada is undoubtedly a systems language (as you said it's been used to build insanely complex systems and it did just fine), but from my POV the little marketing that it has doesn't emphasize that.
I think though one of the reason ada doesn't get discussed a lot is that it doesn't have a big open source community. Ada could even be more popular in terms of actual LoC written, but most of that development is held behind very closed doors, so it's very hard to actually get a community going. Which then makes it hard to actually go through a full rewrite of things like coreutils.
I'm not complaining about the downmods, I'm just weirded out - it's like a music forum disagreeing that flutes are real.
Edit: all links now fixed.
____
(generated, but with references)
# U.S. government guidance on memory-safe languages
Here's the list of links to U.S. government documents recommending memory-safe programming languages for cybersecurity.
1. *White House ONCD - "Back to the Building Blocks" (Feb 2024)* - Encourages developers to use memory-safe languages like Rust, Python, Java, C#, Go, Swift to reduce vulnerabilities. - Link: https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024...
2. *CISA, NSA, FBI, and partners - "Memory Safe Roadmaps" (Dec 2023)* - Recommends memory-safe languages (C#, Go, Java, Rust, Ruby, Swift) and roadmaps to eliminate memory issues. - Link: https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/resources/case-memory-s...
3. *NSA - "Software Memory Safety" (Nov 2022)* - Advises using memory-safe languages like C#, Go, Java, Ruby, Swift to avoid C/C++ vulnerabilities. - Link: https://media.defense.gov/2022/Nov/10/2003112742/-1/-1/0/CSI...
4. *CISA - "Urgent Need for Memory Safety" (Sep 2023, updated Dec 2023)* - Promotes memory-safe languages as part of the Secure by Design campaign. - Link: https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/news/urgent-need-memory-saf...
5. *White House press release - "Future Software Should Be Memory Safe" (Feb 2024)* - Calls for memory-safe languages to reduce cyberattack surfaces. - Link: https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/oncd/briefing-room/2024...
6. *NIST - "Safer Languages" (updated Oct 2022)* - Highlights memory-safe languages like Rust and Ada to prevent common vulnerabilities. - Link: https://www.nist.gov/itl/ssd/software-quality-group/safer-la...
But I'm aware that some people are frightened of new languages and paradigms especially if they're 'harder' than what they're used to.
2) the dependency list is tiny
3) it uses a cargo lock, so even if it were using a GitHub dependency, that file keeps a hash of the dependency and points at the specific commit, so if the dependency were to introduce a backdoor it wouldn't be automatically picked up and a commit history rewrite would also fail
https://github.com/trifectatechfoundation/sudo-rs/blob/main/...
I am not frightened. I program in many languages and have no problems grasping Rust concepts. However I find Rust way too opinionated and restricting for personal tastes. For business I can not see myself replacing C++ with Rust unless my paying clients specifically request it. So far not a single one had expressed any interest.
[1]: https://www.sudo.ws/security/advisories/
[2]: https://www.sudo.ws/security/advisories/unescape_overflow/
This makes me wonder:
1) Would a hypothetical "sudo-lite" with these features removed lead to better security without a rewrite?
2) If these features are useful in the real world, will a Rust rewrite of sudo inevitably gain these features over time and end up with similar problems?
OpenBSD did this with their doas utility:
That's not to say that it won't create other ones.
By all means, write a better, safer, smaller, more secure version of sudo, but don't have command be sudo or sudo-rs, name it something else.
> In practice, there are few installations that use sudo-ldap. Most installations that use LDAP as a directory service and sudo have now opted for sssd, sssd-ldap and libsss-sudo.
> The Debian sudo team recommends the use of libsss-sudo for new installations and the migration of existing installations from sudo-ldap to libsss-sudo and sssd.
It’s not that simple.
And if we're talking about memory bugs (which we were up to now), then definitely no.
But run0 is new C code anyway so I don't see how your claim is relevant.
He was comparing to "normal" sudo, but sudo-rs have the same problems he highlighted anyway
run0 does not (and instead relies on systemd).
---
To answer your next question: setuid, while historic, is a bit weird, and is disabled in some environments, e.g. NoNewPrivileges.
If your bar is “I’ll tolerate such crap”, you may as well run your desktop session as root.
Somehow "maintainability" has never been something I'd ever associate with Ubuntu. Is it a reference to their source tree? That'd make a lot more sense than if they were referring to the OS itself.
The Linux port has not been maintained for 3 years. Has unmerged rowhammer fixes and generally a yolo auth system best described as "dangerous". You are better off using a well maintained project, that includes the CVEs^Wwarts.
It's a mistake to think that `doas` on Linux is the same as `doas` on BSD.
- https://github.com/Duncaen/OpenDoas/issues/106
- https://github.com/slicer69/doas/issues/110
I have a hard time recommending doas over sudo on Linux when the issue has been fixed in sudo but not in doas.
Here is my doas config:
cat /etc/doas.conf
permit nopass jane as root
Sudo: #ALL ALL = (root) NOPASSWD: C_ZFS
I have no idea what is going here, not sure what ALL means, why root is in (), etc.
> some features of the original sudo will not be implemented in sudo-rs if they serve only highly niche use cases
That’s what 99% of distros default to, and it’s simple.