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A comment on CVE-2019-14287: Sudo Bug Allows Restricted Users to Run Commands as Root. Parent comment

Re:CVE-2019-14287: Sudo Bug Allows Restricted Users to Run C... by dTal on Tuesday October 15, 2019 @11:41AM (#21259647)
That is literally the stated purpose of sudo, and the source of its complexity. If you're happy with root access being all-or-nothing, 'su' is adequate. Polkit is another massively complex and ubiquitous system designed to address the same 'minority use case'.

Unpopular opinion: you're right, the vast majority of the time a workstation is single-user, in which case the whole mess isn't worth the hassle and one might as well only have a root account. Heresy! But I've never heard a plausible reasoning why it's fine for $BAD_THING to happen to my home directory, but not /. There's even an xkcd[0] to this effect, which means it must be true.

Hell, for that matter:

echo "alias sudo='sudo evil_command; sudo'" >> ~/.bashrc

is a pretty practical privilege escalation attack for 99% of systems with sudo. I don't think it's worth it.

[0]https://xkcd.com/1200/

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Re:CVE-2019-14287: Sudo Bug Allows Restricted Users to Run C... by admax88q on Tuesday October 15, 2019 @10:26PM (#21266467)
At least polkit is a policy engine that tries to enforce security based upon what you're doing rather than which command you run. Sudo is a broken design IMO, I only ever use it locally to run all root commands so I don't accidentally nuke an important system directory.

Polkit isn't great, but it's also been given the hard job of trying to retrofit policy based security to a system that was not designed with that in mind. But with sudo, so many commands in linux are such a swiss army knife of options that I think its incredibly easy to open up priviledge escalation by adding a seemingly innocent command to somebodies sudoers.

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