MichaIng
commented
6 years ago @userdeveloper98 Thanks very much for your hint. Old topic, but not unimportant from my point of view, thus good that someone pushes it. Your help in this of course is highly appreciated.
The work should not be too much to directly apply this to more/all affected software titles. The higher effort will be to test those software titles, their internal e.g. update functions etc. Best is to check their official installation instructions and see if anyway an own user is recommended or there is some clear reason for using root.
- I would just skip all APT repo installed software, including Lighttpd. There are good reasons if/why Debian/maintainer chooses the binary to start as root. For webservers this is common practise and needed to allow the server bind to SSL port, access to SSL certificates etc., AFAIK. The webservers by default anyway spawn child processes running as www-data user, which are the ones, handling web access. Just starting Lighttpd itself as non-root user will most likely cause issues, break features, messes with what the package maintainer/package update script is expecting.
- I guess you suggest
applicationsgroup to allow another non-root user access, by adding it as well to this group? If we want to do that, I would vote for using e.g.gogs:gogsrespectively, to really limit access to the application itself and root/sudo. If for sure cross-access between applications is needed (www-dataaccessredisserver to use for own-/Nextcloud transactional file locking), than just add the accessing application to the servers group directly:usermod -a -G redis www-data. Or do you have another reason forapplicationsgroup? - I guess for most of those application users we could just skip home directory completely?
- An alternative would be to use the
dietpiuser for all applications. But this only makes sense if it is removed from sudoers, which then might break other tasks ofdietpiI guess, as the plan is to use this for more and more DietPi scripts, instead of root.
A bid off-topic, but as we already have this users topic:
- I am generally not too sure about the benefit of using non-root user for terminal access that then is added to
sudoerswithout sudo password requirement. - If someone get's access to this non-root user, he can simply use
sudoto have full root access anyway. - So why not just directly use root user (for terminal access), skip the need to deal with 2 passwords, better assure full security for root with strong PW, SSH key authentication etc.
- The only benefit I can think of, is to prevent the system from end user accidents. Without root access the user simply cannot really damage the system that easily. But this is more the thinking of Apple and MS and I am more on the side to giving users always full possibilities, including full responsibility.
userdeveloper98
Fourdee
Creating a bug report/issue:
Hi there ! I have noticed that most of the apps installed by dietpi scripts are ruining as root user which is not recommended of sure. I am happy to support migration of all applications to run under non-root user. I did it already for almost all my software pack but it will be nice if we have this out of the box because most of the users may not be aware of this. I will start with Gogs as it was the easiest to migrate application.
Required Information:
Additional Information (if applicable):
Steps to reproduce:
Expected behaviour:
Gogs should run under non root user. ex: gogs user.
Actual behaviour:
Security issue. Gogs run under root user. Exploiting Gogs vulnerability allow full root access to server.
Extra details:
This is the simplest app to migrate I would like to be added as reviewer to PR. (this will facilitate learning the source code :) ) After this I believe I will be able to create my own PR-s and support migration of other apps. Including but not limited to:
Thanks !