Re: [Plplot-devel] linuxvga driver

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

On Thu, 24 Jan 2002, Geoffrey Furnish wrote:

> Alan W. Irwin writes:
>  > I cannot remember whether it was Maurice or Geoffrey who investigated this a
>  > long time ago, but according to my memory of the results back then you
>  > always need root in order to use this driver. Therefore, I have never run or
>  > tested it.  If there is no way to get around this root-only limitation of
>  > libsvga, I think this driver should be disabled in the interests of security.
>
> :-).
>
> /home/furnish> ll /usr/bin/X11/XFree86
> -rws--x--x    1 root     root      1773168 Jan 18  2001  /usr/bin/X11/XFree86*
>
> The "no run-as-root software allowed" rule, would make for a text only
> computing experience.

Sounds good to me....;-)

Seriously though, I agree with your implicit point that from the security
perspective there is no real difference between a setuid programme and one
that demands you be root to run it.  However, there is a practical
difference between the two; when you are running root is is much easier to
screw up (inadvertent typing of "rm -rf /", for example....;-)) then when
you are just running a setuid executable.  Also, for what it is worth, the
security reputation of libsvga is not as good as Xfree86.

>
> I think we should leave it in/available.  People can use it or not
> based on their own policy decisions on their own machine.

Fine by me.  Since I wrote what you are responding to, I found and posted a
way (with a lot of effort) that might work to run svgalib-based code safely
(or at least as safe as X).

Alan