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Bug#709625: protected_hardlinks is too broad - make it per-filesystem instead?



Control: severity -1 wishlist
Control: found -1 3.8.13-1

On Fri, 2013-05-24 at 15:30 +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
[...]
> For now, on that system we have changed the default settings via /proc
> but it's not a real solution for us and DSA don't want to do it
> permanently.

It certainly sounds like a solution to me.  Yes, it removes a useful
safeguard against userland security bugs, but this is a question of risk
management and not known vulnerabilities.

> I can see a few ways that we could change things:
> 
>  * run things using the same account (not wanted, as described above)
>  * share a group between the users and make everything group-writable
>    (ditto)

chown all files in the archive to debian-cd:archvsync but don't give the
owner write permission to them (or the directories).

>  * come up with a fakelink ld_preload lib like we have fakeroot (eww)
> 
> Alternatively, I'm pondering: if the main thrust of the hardlink
> protection is to prevent attacks against system files, then it might
> make more sense to change protected_hardlinks to be a per-filesystem
> mount option. By all means protect the root filesystem etc., but for a
> purely data-carrying filesystem it's a bit obstructive.
> 
> What do you think?

I can see that this could be a useful feature, but I don't think I can
spare the time to work on it any time soon.  If you have the time to
implement this yourself, I would be happy to review the changes but you
will need to submit them upstream.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
Computers are not intelligent.	They only think they are.

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