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A comment on German BSI withholds Truecrypt security report. Parent comment

Re:German BSI withholds Truecrypt security report by mehrdadn on Monday December 16, 2019 @05:50PM (#21808353)
Off the top of my head? Ask a system service that has the privilege to change it for you after authenticating you.
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Re:German BSI withholds Truecrypt security report by saagarjha on Monday December 16, 2019 @05:54PM (#21808403)
Isn’t that exactly what passwd is? A system service that has permission to change the passwords file?
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Re:German BSI withholds Truecrypt security report by mehrdadn on Monday December 16, 2019 @05:58PM (#21808443)
No, the point is that passwd should obtain its privilege by virtue of being started by a privileged process, not by virtue of being marked as a privileged program when it's run by an unprivileged user.
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Re:German BSI withholds Truecrypt security report by saagarjha on Monday December 16, 2019 @06:49PM (#21808891)
How do you start the privileged process as a normal user?
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Re:German BSI withholds Truecrypt security report by mehrdadn on Monday December 16, 2019 @06:52PM (#21808913)
You don't. It's already started as part of the system. Or you ask some part of the system that is willing to authenticate you to do it for you.
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Re:German BSI withholds Truecrypt security report by exikyut on Monday December 16, 2019 @10:03PM (#21810125)
Shhhhhhhhhh.

Stop giving systemd more ideas.

(/s)

(But seriously, imagine a world where you can't get root because D-Bus crashed.)

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Re:German BSI withholds Truecrypt security report by ATsch on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @06:01AM (#21812453)
PolicyKit essentially already does this, and all of the systemd *ctl commands support authentication via polkit
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Re:German BSI withholds Truecrypt security report by exikyut on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @08:25PM (#21820907)
TIL (so that's what the whole PolicyKit thing was all about).

Now I'm wondering what its worst case crash behavior is like.

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