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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Systemd wants to expand to include a sudo replacement (outpost.fosspost.org)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] nyan 44 points 7 months ago (10 children)

sudo is already an optional component (yes, really—I don't have it installed). Don't want its attack surface? You can stick with su and its attack surface instead. Either is going to be smaller than systemd's.

systemd's feature creep is only surpassed by that of emacs.

[–] fruitycoder 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I'm not a fan of having root be able to actually login.

Even more so in a true multiuser env where I would rather have privilege escalation be more granular (certain user/groups can esculate certain actions but not others, maybe even limit options of a cmd).

[–] nyan 2 points 7 months ago

Granted, in a true multiuser environment with an admin who's carefully tailoring /etc/sudoers to make sure everyone has the least possible privileges that will allow them to still do what they need, sudo is more secure. There's no doubt of that.

On a machine that has only one human user who's also the admin, and retains the default sudo-with-user-passwords configuration, su vs sudo is pretty much a wash, security-wise. su requires a second password to get root access, but sudo times out and requires the password to be re-entered while a shell created by su can stay open indefinitely. Which is more easily broken will depend on other details of your situation.

(If you're running an incorrectly configured ssh server that allows direct root login with only password authentification, having a root password could contribute to problems, but the correct fix there is to reconfigure the ssh server not to do something so stupid. I hope there's no distro that still ships that way out of the box.)

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