On 27.01.2022 00:21, Adam Williamson wrote:
Hi folks!
Hi!
For anyone who hasn't seen it yet - there's quite a kerfuffle
today
about a major security issue in polkit:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/01/a-bug-lurking-for-...
turns out that ever since it was invented, `pkexec` has had a bug
allowing for local root privilege escalation. Which is...bad.
The issue and some of the comments around it prompted me to wonder -
why is `pkexec` still a thing? Particularly, why is it still a thing we
are shipping by default in just about every Fedora install?
My best recollection is that pkexec was kinda a kludge to allow us to
get rid of consolehelper: some apps weren't getting rewritten to the
Right Way of doing things under policykit, they still just wanted to
have the entire app run as root, and pkexec was a way to make that
happen.
But that was then, and this is now. Does anything in Workstation use
pkexec? Does anything in KDE use it? I'm pretty sure (at least I really
hope!) nothing in Server uses it. I don't think any of our
well, a simple ag on
/usr/{bin,sbin} show presence of pkexec in the following:
root@hal: ~ # ag -l pkexec /usr/bin/
/usr/bin/lshw-gui
/usr/bin/usbview
/usr/bin/system-config-language
/usr/bin/gparted
/usr/bin/ettercap-pkexec
/usr/bin/gsmartcontrol-root
/usr/bin/x11docker
root@hal: ~ # ag -l pkexec /usr/sbin/
/usr/sbin/tuned-gui
so, while my desktop is a simple desktop and could be not representative
at least show some offending applications..
HTH,
Adrian