sudo in general, and not requiring password in particular (was Re: trouble adding my user to sudoers list)

[Ryan Petris]

I feel like you're trolling so I'm not going to spend very much time on this.

It's been a generally good security practice for at least the last 25+ years to not regularly run as a privileged user, requiring some sort of escalation to do administrative-type tasks. By using passwordless sudo, you're taking away that escalation. Why not just run as root? Then you don't need sudo at all. In fact, why even have a password at all? Why encrypt? Why don't you just put all your data on a publicly accessible FTP server and just grab stuff when you need it? The NSA has all your data anyway and you don't have anything to hide so why not just leave it out there for the world to see?

As for something malicious needing to be written to use sudo, why wouldn't it? sudo is ubiquitous on unix systems; if it didn't at least try then that seams like a pretty dumb malicious script to me.

You also don't necessarily need to open/run something for it to run. IIRC there was a recent image vulnerability in Gnome's tracker-miner application which indexes files in your home directory. And before you say that wouldn't happen in KDE, it too has a similar program, I believe called Baloo.

There also exists the recent doas program and the systemd replacement run0 to do the same.

On Wed, Jun 26, 2024, at 12:23 PM, Rusty Carruth via PLUG-discuss wrote:
> Actually, I'd like to start a bit of a discussion on this.
> 
> 
> First, I know that for some reason RedHat seems to think that sudo is 
> bad/insecure.
> 
> I'd like to know the logic there, as I think the argument FOR using sudo 
> is MUCH stronger than any argument I've heard (which, admittedly, is 
> pretty close to zero) AGAINST it.   Here's my thinking:
> 
> Allowing users to become root via sudo gives you:
> 
>  - VERY fine control over what programs a user can use as root
> 
>  - The ability to remove admin privs (ability to run as root) from an 
> individual WITHOUT having to change root password everywhere.
> 
> Now, remember, RH is supposedly 'corporate friendly'.  As a corporation, 
> that 2nd feature is well worth the price of admission, PLUS I can only 
> allow certain admins to run certain programs? Very nice.
> 
> So, for example, at my last place I allowed the 'tester' user to run 
> fdisk as root, because they needed to partition the disk under test.  In 
> my case, and since the network that we ran on was totally isolated from 
> the corporate network, I let fdisk be run without needing a password.  
> Oh, and if they messed up and fdisk'ed the boot partition, it was no big 
> deal - I could recreate the machine from scratch (minus whatever data 
> hadn't been copied off yet - which would only be their most recent run), 
> in 10 minutes (which was about 2 minutes of my time, and 8 minutes of 
> scripted 'dd' ;-)  However, if the test user wanted to become root using 
> su, they had to enter the test user password.
> 
> So, back to the original question - setting sudo to not require a 
> password.  We should have asked, what program do you want to run as root 
> without requiring a password?  How secure is your system? What else do 
> you use it for?  Who has access?  etc, etc, etc.
> 
> There's one other minor objection I have to the 'zero defense' statement 
> below - the malicious thing you downloaded (and, I assume ran) has to be 
> written to USE sudo in its attempt to break in, I believe, or it 
> wouldn't matter HOW open your sudo was. (simply saying 'su - myscript' 
> won't do it).
> 
> And, if you're truly paranoid about stuff you download, you should:
> 
> 1 - NEVER download something you don't have an excellent reason to 
> believe is 'safe', and ALWAYS make sure you actually downloaded it from 
> where you thought you did.
> 
> 2 - For the TRULY paranoid, have a machine you use to download and test 
> software on, which you can totally disconnect from your network (not 
> JUST the internet), and which has NO confidential info, and which you 
> can erase and rebuild without caring.  Run the downloaded stuff there, 
> for a long time, until you're pretty sure it won't bite you.
> 
> 3 - For the REALLY REALLY paranoid, don't download anything from 
> anywhere, disconnect from the internet permanently, get high-tech locks 
> for your doors, and wrap your house in a faraday cage!
> 
> And probably don't leave the house....
> 
> The point of number 3 is that there is always a risk, even with 
> 'well-known' software, and as someone else said - they're watching you 
> anyway.  The question is how 'safe' do you want to be? And how paranoid 
> are you, really?
> 
> Wow, talk about rabbit hole! ;-)
> 
> 'Let the flames begin!' :-)
> 
> 
> On 6/25/24 18:50, Ryan Petris via PLUG-discuss wrote:
> >> wanted sudo not to require a password.
> > Please reconsider this... This is VERY BAD security practice. There's basically zero defense if you happen to download/run something malicious.
> >
> > On Tue, Jun 25, 2024, at 6:01 PM, Michael via PLUG-discuss wrote:
> >>   then I remember that a PLUG member mentioned ChatGPT being good at troubleshooting so I figured I'd give it a go. I sprint about half an hour asking it the wrong question but after that it took 2 minutes. I wanted sudo not to require a password. it is wonderful! now I don't have to bug you guys. so it looks like this is the end of the user group unless you want to talk about OT stuff.
> >>
> >> --
> >> :-)~MIKE~(-:
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