U.V. Ravindra wrote: > Danek Duvall wrote at Tue Jul 21 2009 16:48:53 GMT-0700 (PDT): >> Has any thought been given to having fake elevated privileges, or fake >> role >> assumption? > > Apologies: I am a bit unsure as to the meaning of the question. > > If you are asking whether fakeroot can cause privilege escalation > or allow the user to assume roles s/he is not allowed to assume, > then the answer is it cannot. > > If, OTOH, your question is whether fakeroot can give the impression > of privilege escalation, then yes, that's what it is basically > designed for. When a user runs (a command under) fakeroot, s/he > is fakely reported (to the command) as being root. So, the command > thinks the user has all privileges.
I think the question was whether "fakeroot" could provide the application with an environment in which the application 'thought' that it had some set of privileges, even though it didn't. It's a logical extension of "fakeroot" into the Solaris architecture. Because of Least Privilege, there's not really the "all powerful root" on Solaris as there is on other platforms. The current "fakeroot" emulates that old-school all-powerful root by creating an environment for the application where it appears as though all privileges were granted. But the question is whether "fakeroot" could be extended to make it appear as though some specified set of privileges were set. It'd be an interesting idea for testing, but I think it'd actually be counter-productive to do this. The problem is that the actual privilege enforcement (and thus the effects of each privilege bit) are hard-coded into the kernel itself. There's no good way to replicate that logic out into a user-space wrapper so that the code somehow 'knows' whether a given system call should have succeeded give a privilege set. -- James Carlson 42.703N 71.076W <carlsonj at workingcode.com>
