one user per daemon?

[Christian Kujau <evil@g-house.de>]

hi,

in another (german) newsgroup i saw a comment, being a bit upset about 
the general-every-distribution behaviour to install new daemons under a 
single user id. to be clear, if debconf/dpkg/whatever set up e.g. ntpd, 
the default is that "root" starts the daemon. or user "nobody" does, but 
another daemon was configured to be run from "nobody" too. the same 
applies for user "daemon". only a few daemons are run by other users by 
default, apache, snort or squid.

the things is, when some of the "nobody" processes are compromised, 
*every* daemon "nobody" has started is in danger to be killed or misused.

/etc/password lists a lot of unused (but somehow standard-)users, they 
could be used to run processes under a different user id.

yes, it's a bit confusing, please ask if i was unlcear.

Thanks for comments,
Christian.

--
BOFH excuse #224:

Jan  9 16:41:27 huber su: 'su root' succeeded for .... on /dev/pts/1