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SubjectRe: PUBLIC CHALLENGE: (was RE: devfs again, (was RE: USB device a lloc ation) )
   Date:   Sun, 10 Oct 1999 17:10:41 -0300
From: Horst von Brand <vonbrand@sleipnir.valparaiso.cl>

Security implications worry me: When a new device shows up, the devd starts
some proggie to configure it (permissions, ifconfig, whatever). This will
be a program with root privilege, or at least device creating/configuring
capability. OK, whom is this GUI (Big mess! Hard to audit!) program going
to contact? Current user at the console, only user on the machine (some
vermin over the net, perhaps), wait for root to show up? Might be OK for a
personal, non-networked machine. For a server it is out, AFAIKS. And then a
substantial chunk of the proposed functionality is lost.

True, but for a server you're much less likely to be randomly inserting
random devices into the thing. And a server is likely to have a clueful
sysadmin to administer the machine. If not, the whole thing will likely
be a security disaster quite quickly anyway, GUI or no GUI.

I imagine that the GUI would only be used for a single-user personal
workstation. I.e., "Windows 98" mode. It doesn't matter whether it's
networked or not; an attacker can't plug in a new USB scanner into the
system over the network. :-) But yes, if you're going to be doing GUI
work, the assumption is that the person sitting in front of the console
is trusted.

This is true already with RedHat 6.0; from GNOME when you're logged into
the console, when you select logout, you can ask to reboot/halt the
workstation. The assumption here is that if you're in front of the
console, you probably have physical access to the power switch, so you
might as well be able to shut down the machine cleanly. Hopefully
there's a way to disable this if a machine is being used both as a GNOME
desktop and as a timesharing machine, where you don't want a
non-privileged user to be able to shut down the machine. But it's
very likely that if you're running a graphical desktop, it's also a
single-user machine.

- Ted

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