Re: Access rights with growisofs

[Jacob Meuser <jakemsr@jakemsr.com>]

On Tue, Jul 13, 2004 at 05:44:21AM +0800, Nick Urbanik wrote:

> I agree that sudo is useful; I wrote this intro to sudo for my
> students: http://ictlab.tyict.vtc.edu.hk/ossi/lab/sudo/sudo.pdf which
> includes a picture of a chainsaw, under which I wrote, "Doing
> everything as root is like cutting bread with a chainsaw."
> 
> However, Andy wrote in his man page for growisofs in
> dvd+rw-tools-5.19.4.9.7 that 
> "If executed under sudo(8) growisofs refuses to start."
> ...
> #!/bin/ksh
> unset SUDO_COMMAND
> export MKISOFS=/path/to/trusted/mkisofs
> exec growisofs "$@"
> 
> And there is the answer to my question.  Andy is rightly concerned
> that running growisofs under sudo allows any user with sudo privilege
> read access to any file in the file system, as well as the right to
> execute program of their choice with elevated privileges.

This is just like the situation with more(1) or less(1).

IMHO, this is a dumb argument.  Whether or not sudo is properly
understood, configured or used is not growisofs's problem.

-- 
<jakemsr@jakemsr.com>