Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 2 May 2006 21:24:22 -0400 | From | "Jon Smirl" <> | Subject | Re: Add a "enable" sysfs attribute to the pci devices to allow userspace (Xorg) to enable devices without doing foul direct access |
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On 5/2/06, Matthew Wilcox <matthew@wil.cx> wrote: > On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 05:52:09PM -0400, Jon Smirl wrote: > > Have you seen this method of getting root from X? > > http://www.cansecwest.com/slides06/csw06-duflot.ppt > > It is referenced from Theo de Raadt interview on kerneltrap > > http://kerneltrap.org/node/6550 > > That's a great indication of why securelevels aren't. > It pretty much fits the Linux model of "once you're root, you can do > anything". The POSIX Capabilities really don't help either. > I suppose SELinux might be able to help, but I don't care to get into > that discussion here ;-)
And there is the root exploit found by Coverity this week too: http://news.yahoo.com/s/zd/20060502/tc_zd/177195
X is multiple megabytes of code needlessly running as root. If we could convince X to use device drivers to talk to the hardware it wouldn't need to run as root. This is part of why I am against this patch, it is another crutch to let X keep on running as root instead of fixing the underlying problem.
-- Jon Smirl jonsmirl@gmail.com - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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