Re: pkg and root privileges

On Tue, Jul 26, 2022 at 07:15:43PM +0300, niko.nastonen@icloud.com wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> There was a recent discussion on the FreeBSD forum about security of pkg and its ability to drop root privileges when fetching packages.
> 
> I couldn’t help but notice that there was a git commit
> 
> fcceab3f with comment "drop privileges when using libfetch”
> 
> and another one
> 
> f3b0469e with comment "Stop dropping privileges when fetching as it causes more issues than it solved”.
> 
> Can I ask what kind of issues the first commit introduces and why pkg still goes out to the internet unprotected?
> 
> In case the issues are already solved by later commits, let me present a silly patch (mostly copied from fcceab3f) for branch "release-1.18” which makes fetch use nobody instead of root.
> 
> Feel free to modify it to match “the real BSD hacker standards, if applicable” :-)
> 
I am interested in the thread on the forum, if you can point it out to me.

The reason why it was dropped is because, libfetch allows to access many thing
(like ~/.netrc but not only) and many users are using such features of libfetch.

I dropped the "drop of privileges" the time to work on libfetch to make it more
friendly to the "drop of provileges" which I started but never finished.

Thank you for the reminder I will move that up on my TODO list for 1.19

Best regards,
Bapt