[LEDE-DEV] running stuff as !root

[David Lang]

On Wed, 18 May 2016, John Crispin wrote:

> On 18/05/2016 08:09, Daniel Curran-Dickinson wrote:
>> On 16-05-18 01:05 AM, John Crispin wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> we had previously started building the infra for running stuff as !root.
>>> so far we have added
>>>
>>> * the userid/gid stuff
>>> * acl on ubus
>>>
>>> things that i know are missing
>>>
>>> * handling network ports < 1024
>>>
>>> what am i missing ? can anyone think of other issues we need to address
>>> before we change uid to !root ?
>>>
>>
>> Er, do you mean uid of procd or ubus or everything?  I'm not sure we're
>> clear on which uid you mean?
>
> ok, my mail that sounded totally obvious to me apparently was hard to
> understand.
>
> right now we run $everything as root which is obviously rather daring so
> we need to change it to what normal distros do and run stuff as their
> own users wherever it makes sense and give those users only the
> permissions required.

Ok, that makes a lot of sense. The good news here is that we don't have to start 
off with doing fancy stuff like passing sockets around, playing with 
capabilities to bind to low ports, SELinux/AppArmor, etc. We can start off by 
just copying the sysV init configs that have existed for other distros.

Most of the work is actually going to be in undoing OpenWRT specific configs 
that run everything as root and fall more in line with what the other distros 
are doing.

The first question I would have is if we are going to the system users in an 
essentially random order (as needed so two systems with the same packages 
installed in a different order have different user->uid mapping) or if we are 
going to define service accounts distro wide so they are always going to be the 
same.

David Lang