On 2013-10-30 13:08, Reindl Harald wrote:
Am 30.10.2013 13:00, schrieb Alec Leamas:
> On 2013-10-30 12:25, Reindl Harald wrote:
>> i gave you a starting point to learn about security and the reason
>> for sftp-chroot doing so is that someone could use race-conditions
>> to bypass the security
>>
>> if you do not understand that allowing any random application running
>> with your normal user permissions place a binary inside PATH is a bad
>> idea i really can not help you
>>
>> security is *always* a process and layered, there are a lot of things
>> to consider in different levels and while you can not gain 100%
>> security you can make it harder to bypass restrictions on several
>> places and doing things which are clearly against is not smart
>>
>> you can decide that security is not that important for you
>> but a distribution as such should not make such wrong decisions for all users
> No, it should not. However, the right decision is in many cases a trade-off between
security and usabilty, not
> always with a single answer. Allowing users to install sw (i. e., allowing random
applications to put things in
> $PATH) has of course security implications. Dis-allowing has usability aspects. My
personal view is that for the
> distribution the defaults should allow and support user-installed sw.
the distribution should *not* train users doing this in their userhome
that is why /usr/local exists and software besides packages belongs
there and should be installed as root, 1 out of 1000 users need
to install software in the userhome, if so they should learn
about the implications and have a small barrier
it's not that hard to edit .bash_profile but you need to do it by hand
which means you have to spend a thought about it which is completly
different to "i did not know about the door i never opened by myself
> And, isn't this still a little off-topic?
no it is not because the topic is in the subject
> Current defaults already has ~/bin in $PATH, and user can certainly put
> things there. Isn't the issue here if having a hidden, writeable directory
> in $PATH is such a bad idea, given that users actually can install sw?
guess how many users are aware of the hidden directory compared with
"bin" in the userhome and how often someone may take a look
you can now argue that the user does not look in both of them
and i argue that extaly *this* is the problem
the defaults are dangerous for the majority of ordinary users
but there are users sometimes take a look what is in their userhome
the chance doing also in hidden subdirectories is by zero
I'm not convinced by your arguments, and to be fair I havn't really
argued for my own position. I suggest that we agree on that we disagree:
- if user-installed sw in $HOME should be supported.
- if having ~/.local/bin in $PATH is a bad enough idea to drop it.
--alec