On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 08:33:40AM -0500, James Carlson wrote: > Joep Vesseur writes: > > If this were a review of an in-house developed piece of software, I'd > > strongly > > suggest to find alternatives (either run with just the privileges needed to > > validate passwords, or run with a different database, or delegate > > authenticating users to a sub-task that doesn't deal with forwarding packets > > like the main daemon does). I don't know how far we'd go for imported > > products; I guess it depends on what we want to build on top of this. > > I think having a separate, generic authenticator daemon to run the PAM > functions on behalf of less-privileged programs (and thus isolating > [...]
It's called embedded_su(1M) :) (Yes, it's not a daemon, it has to be fork/exec'ed, which means that the SOCKS daemon in this case must retain those basic privs, or build its own "authenticator daemon" which retains them and runs embedded_su on behalf of the main daemon which does not retain those basic privs. In any case, this is probably well outside the scope of the project.) Nico --
