Kata1yst

I strongly disagree with your premise. Separating authentication and privilege escalation adds layers of security that are non-trivial and greatly enhance resilience. Many attacks are detected and stopped at privilege escalation, because it happens locally before a user can stop or delete the flow of logs.

If I get into your non-privileged account I can set up a program that acts like sudo

No you cannot. A non privileged user doesn't have the access necessary to run a program that can accomplish this.

And even if they do it’s too late anyway because I’ve just compromised root and locked everybody out and I’m in there shitting on the filesystems or whatever. Because root can do anything.

Once again, you didn't privilege escalate, because once you have a foothold (authentication) you don't have the necessary privileges, so you must perform reconnaissance to identify an exploitable vector to privilage escalate with. This can be any number of things, but it's always noisy and slow, usually easy to detect in logs. There is a reason the most sophisticated attacks against well protected targets are "low and slow".

And if I can’t break into your non-privileged account then I can’t break into a privileged account either.

You're ignoring my points given regarding the risks of compromised keys. If there are no admin keys, there are no remote admin sessions.

These artificial distinctions between “non-privileged” and “superuser” accounts need to stop. This is not good security, this is not zero trust. Either you don’t trust anybody and enforce explicit privilege escalation for specific things, or just accept that you’re using a “super” paradigm and once you’ve got access to that user all bets are off.

Spoken like someone who has never red teamed or purple teamed. Even admin accounts are untrusted, given only privileges specific to their role, and closely monitored. That doesn't mean they should have valid security measures thrown away.

Wouldn’t separate SSH keys achieve the same?

Separate ssh keys for the user and the admin? Yeah, see point 2, admins should not be remotely accessible.

Really? How, exactly? Break the ssh key authentication? And wouldn’t that apply to all accounts equally?

Keys aren't perfect security. They can easily be mishandled, sometimes getting published to GitHub, copied to USB drives which can easily be lost, etc.

Further, there have been attacks against SSH that let malicious actors connect remotely to any session, or take over existing sessions. By not allowing remote access on privileged accounts, you minimize risk.

Forcing a non privileged remote session to authenticate with a password establishes a second factor of security that is different from the first. This means a cracked password or a lost key is still not enough for a malicious actor to accomplish administrative privileges.

A key is something you have

A password is something you know

So, by not allowing remote privileged sessions, we're forcing a malicious actor to take one more non-trivial step before arriving at their goals. A step that will likely be fairly obvious in logs on a monitored machine.

On a server, it allows you to track who initiates which root season session. It also greatly minimizes the attack surface from a security perspective to have admin privileged accounts unable to be remotely connected to.

Whataboutism? Really? That's the game we're playing?

Sure, okay, I'll bite.

Edward Snowden: He's a hero, no doubt in my mind. But from this perspective, no one has attacked him since his departure from the US. Formal requests have been made to extradite him and they've been turned down. Once on foreign soil the US respected Russian sovereignty.

Julian Assange: Okay personally I find Assange to be a piece of shit, but that aside, the extradition process has been followed legally.

Chelsea Manning: Broke the law. And while her initial imprisonment situation was absolutely concerning, it was legal. The legal process was followed, and the sentence given was far short of the maximum. Her sentence was commuted by a sitting president. No foreign governments were involved, so no sovereignty was violated.

Drake and Binny: Always were on US soil. No foreign involvement whatsoever. They were raided and Drake was changed with crimes. He received probation and community service. Once again, the legal process was followed and no foreign sovereignty violated.

Boeing Whistleblowers: What the fuck is this arguement? You think the US is happy one of it's biggest military manufacturers and transportation providers has serious quality issues? You think the US is taking action against the whistleblowers? Be serious.

Basically: you're saying the US charges people who violate the laws around information handling as criminals. Yes, that's true. Now, I personally am sympathetic to most of these cases. I assume you are too. Whistleblowers should be better protected, but at the same time some information, like the names and personal information of government assets abroad, reasonably should be protected. It's a delicate balance, and one I think the US could greatly improve.

However, these are not similar to the cases in question. The cases in question are actions by governments on foreign soil or against US citizens. This is an enormous violation of sovereignty, legality, and due process. That's the issue at hand.

They even literally have a section of the article that says they "see Fair Software as an alternative model to the free and open source software model", and they think it's superior because the "developers can profit".

Newsflash: the developers usually see fractions of those cents while most of the money goes to the management and shareholders of the company that employs them. Hmm, doesn't seem fair to me.

Also, developers can and do profit from FOSS in many ways, but the most popular models are with commercial support, SaaS offerings, and additional functionality (like providing a web interface, clustering manager or other external piece of the puzzle to solve the problem at scale in enterprise).

Like you said so succinctly: propaganda website to make rug pullers like Elastic and Hashicorp look better.

I host my own to avoid running into timeouts, fairly easy

MRSA infection following hospital admittance for Pneumonia. That shit is serious and way more prevalent than people think, it's just that it usually kills people who are already terminally ill.

Unlikely to be an assassination. But not impossible. Either way, looks very bad.

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/glass-lewis-recommends-investors-vote-against-three-boeing-directors-2024-04-30/

The recommendation to shareholders from the independent advisor who proxies Boeing is to vote out several board members who are responsible for safety and QA. Crazy to see at a Fortune 100.

Accurate, but not bad, yes. It turns out standardized base systems and ABIs are important to an ecosystem.

Linux tried the disorganized free-for-all for two decades, and what we got was fragmented "Ubuntu admins", "debian admins", "redhat admins", "suse admins", and a whole shitload of duplicated effort in the packaging ecosystem, only for half the packages out there to be locked to Ubuntu or RHEL. So the corporate interests, and a fair number of the community efforts, centralized their problems and solutions into a small standardized suite in Mesa+Wayland+systemd+Pipewire+flatpak, etc

The result is a ton more interoperability, a truly open ecosystem where switching your distro doesn't mean hiring different people and using different software, and a lot more stability and maturity.

And hey, if a user or distro wants to do their own thing, they can make and own their niche, same as before. Nothing lost.

It's been kind of wild to watch over the past 15 years or so, makes me very hopeful for the next 15.

No no you don't understand. The evil corporate overlords abused their power to force a choice on a developer, even though that choice was objectively the right choice and the developer was throwing a tantrum.

This is truly awful. We must not let evil corporations, no matter their credentials, expertise, and decades of beneficial partnership with open source, tell immature and short sighted developers how to develop.

Quad9