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A comment on Systemd Opened Security Hole in Linux, VPNs Could Be Compromised. Parent comment

Re:Systemd Opened Security Hole in Linux, VPNs Could Be Comp... by NelsonMinar on Saturday December 07, 2019 @10:58AM (#21730900)
I think this kind exposure is inevitable with something as big as systemd. If you look at the old scripts-and-daemons hairball that systemd replaces, it has a lot of security warts too. (Albeit with 20 years of wart removal as well.)

What worries me is that systemd is not engineered and managed as a project with this kind of risk. Instead it feels like a lot of cowboy coding.

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Re:Systemd Opened Security Hole in Linux, VPNs Could Be Comp... by zzzcpan on Saturday December 07, 2019 @11:24AM (#21731050)
> If you look at the old scripts-and-daemons hairball that systemd replaces, it has a lot of security warts too.

Not even close. Scripts were always memory safe and limitations of shell didn't allow to go crazy with things and introduce security issues left and right.

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Re:Systemd Opened Security Hole in Linux, VPNs Could Be Comp... by dfox on Saturday December 07, 2019 @11:39AM (#21731119)
Whether shell is memory-safe is completely irrelevant as the language has more significant safety issues with regards to quoting, eval and such.

And second reason why it is irrelevant is that the traditional bunch-of-shell-scripts init system does not process any kind of untrusted input.

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Re:Systemd Opened Security Hole in Linux, VPNs Could Be Comp... by zzzcpan on Saturday December 07, 2019 @12:00PM (#21731242)
It does deal with some untrusted input, often not directly in shell though, but through other tools.
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Re:Systemd Opened Security Hole in Linux, VPNs Could Be Comp... by bonzini on Saturday December 07, 2019 @11:50AM (#21731188)
Instead you had quoting bugs where the shell scripts ended up rm -rf /'ing your machine.
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Re:Systemd Opened Security Hole in Linux, VPNs Could Be Comp... by qxnqd on Saturday December 07, 2019 @10:58AM (#21730903)
SystemD should not be as big as it is.
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