Homebrew 3.0 - Hackdot

Re:Homebrew 3.0 by sirn on Friday February 05, 2021 @11:08AM (#26037793)

> Like Homebrew does not need elevated privileges to work and actively discourages it

It does this by chowning /usr/local to a local user, which is worse for security than running sudo because now any malicious process can overwrite /usr/local/bin/bash without asking for privileges. macOS having /usr/local/bin in its $PATH by default also doesn't help. Homebrew made this security vs usability tradeoff because most Mac users are a single user, which makes sense in its context.

The recent change of moving Homebrew to /opt/homebrew (at least for M1 Mac) is a better solution for this as it is no longer in the default $PATH. On the other hand, MacPorts approach of requiring sudo allows it to drop privileges to other unprivileged non-admin user (macports) during build in addition to building everything via sandbox-exec.

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Re:Homebrew 3.0 by LiberatedLlama on Friday February 05, 2021 @12:28PM (#26038754)

Running untrusted software on these sort of systems is fundamentally broken, no matter what the package manager chooses chown or not chown. A malicious program could edit ~/.bashrc to modify the user's PATH, or wrap sudo with a keylogger then use that password to chown anything it likes. That's not even a theoretical but unlikely sort of attack; it's quite trivial.

    > alias sudo='echo not what I expected'
    > sudo foo
    not what I expected

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Re:Homebrew 3.0 by sirn on Friday February 05, 2021 @12:36PM (#26038865)

That's fair, but it's only affecting single user, while writable /usr/local affects all users. However most Mac users are single user, so the tradeoff makes sense in this context.

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