Lennart Poettering wrote:
CVE-2014-9680, CVE-2014-0106, CVE-2010-3853, CVE-2010-1646,
CVE-2008-3825, CVE-2006-0151, CVE-2005-4158, CVE-2005-3629,
CVE-2005-2959, CVE-2004-1051, CVE-2002-0043, …
These are all env var cleanup issues in su/sudo context.
And the environment variable cleanup (which is uncontestably necessary for
security (*)) also comes with collateral damage that makes it a bad idea to
run monolithic GUI programs under such tools, see, e.g.:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1171779
(*) Now, arguably, the default configuration of pkexec actually does *not*
need the cleanup because it does not allow unprivileged users to run
only selected commands, but both sudo and pkexec can be configured to
allow that, and then you need to prevent the invoker from getting
arbitrary code execution through environment variable hacks.
(Of course, D-Bus-activating those GUI programs will not work either. They
need to be split into unprivileged GUI and privileged helper(s).)
Kevin Kofler