On Mon, 2014-04-28 at 17:15 +0000, Colin Walters wrote:
On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 12:45 PM, Tomasz Torcz
<tomek(a)pipebreaker.pl>
wrote:
>
> Risking being totally offtopic, but would TCB solve all most of
> this issues?
>
www.openwall.com/tcb/ or
>
http://www.openwall.com/presentations/Owl/mgp00020.html
It helps a little, but the problem here is not exactly about the
underlying data format, but more about the merge/upgrade logic, which
TCB by itself doesn't quite solve.
We would still need logic somewhere (likely ostree), like today how it
lives in RPM %post scripts to check whether users exist, and if not
create them. The binding between that logic and how the files get
created on disk is the hard problem.
Also I originally thought TCB was a good idea, but I got less excited
about it when I realized they'd just shifted setuid binaries to setgid.
To me it'd be far more valuable to go the whole way and have
authentication/passwd talk to a system service. Then you could even
implement stuff like rate limiting sanely.
We can do that with SSSD, which we are planning to take over all users
(though it will leave /etc/passwd on the system for emergency repair and
backward compatibility).
Simo.
--
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York