Re: If you care about debian's security read this
First off, thanks for the patch (even if it's not technically for
gnome-sudo).
On Sun, 2002-03-03 at 23:47, Anthony Towns wrote:
> This seems difficult with support in sudo for it: there doesn't seem
> to be any way for the launcher (gnome-sudo) to tell whether sudo's
> asked for a password without the program being run telling the launcher
> that it's running now. Which means the gnome-sudo-helper needs to be
> in sudoers, which means the only option is running sudo twice somehow,
> which I think still has problems (if your local config is to always ask
> for passwords, eg).
What I've been looking at is some way to pass the list of sudo-allowed
commands to gnome-sudo-helper somehow. Ruling out patching sudo, all
roads seem to lead to writing a parser for /etc/sudoers to at least some
extent. I may be able to get away with calling sudo -l and parsing that
(which simplifies things).
I don't think at this time that I'll be able to get away with something
that "just works" without some judicious editing of /etc/sudoers
needed. I think I can get it so that I could say something like "add
this to /etc/sudoers and it'll work"; kinda like it is now, except
respecting the command restrictions.
Of course...
> So, here's one way of changing sudo. It essentially adds support for the
> SSH_ASKPASS environment variable for querying passwords and such. Since
> XAUTHORITY is passed through in the environment, this should do away
> with the need for gnome-sudo-helper, and just let gnome-sudo call "sudo
> <cmd>" directly.
>
> It appears to work, and doesn't have at least one obvious security hole.
> It doesn't do all its dialogue via ssh-askpass, though, which might be
> considered a bug.
If this, or something like it, were to be accepted by the sudo
maintainer (or, even better, sudo upstream), that would be perfect.
Maybe I should file this as a wishlist bug.
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