Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering has posted on Mastodon about their upcoming v256 release of Systemd, which is expected to include a sudo replacem...
Agreed, this is a nice inclusion. I also hate sudoers with a passion - I already use doas but it’s not standard (in the Linux world anyway), but with systemd providing an alternative means that it’ll become a standard which most distros would adopt, and I hope this means we can finally ditch the convoluted sudoers file once and for all.
The thing with this is: its just a symlink to the systemd-run binary, which talks to PID1 to spawn new processes (in separate cgroups IIRC). Its one of the most fundamental parts of systemd. Even the debian systemd package includes systemd-run.
I guess the other question is if some tools the distro provides might switch to supporting it by default. For example on Arch there is makepkg that should never be executed as root, but does internally call some things with elevated privileges (mostly pacman to install and remove packages). Currently it checks for sudo and if not falls back to su, but maybe it might be worth considering changing su for run0 if its guaranteed to be there.
doas is quite popular in the BSD world, and was ported to Linux a few years ago (via the OpenDoas project).
For starters, it’s is a lot smaller than sudo - under 2k lines of code vs sudo’s 132k - this makes it lot more easier to audit and maintain, and technically less likely to have vulnerabilities.
Another security advantage is that doas doesn’t pass on the environment variables by default (you’d have to explicitly declare the ones you want to pass, which you can do so in the config).
The config is also a lot simpler, and doesn’t force you to use visudo - which never made sense to me, visudo should’ve just generated the actual config, instead of checking it after the fact. Kinda like how grubby or grub2-mkconfig works. But no need for that complexity with doas.
Eg, the most basic doas config could just have one line in the file: permit: wheel. Maybe have another line for programs you want to run without a password, like permit nopass dexter cmd pacman.
Agreed, this is a nice inclusion. I also hate sudoers with a passion - I already use
doasbut it’s not standard (in the Linux world anyway), but with systemd providing an alternative means that it’ll become a standard which most distros would adopt, and I hope this means we can finally ditch the convoluted sudoers file once and for all.deleted by creator
The thing with this is: its just a symlink to the
systemd-runbinary, which talks to PID1 to spawn new processes (in separate cgroups IIRC). Its one of the most fundamental parts of systemd. Even the debiansystemdpackage includessystemd-run.I guess the other question is if some tools the distro provides might switch to supporting it by default. For example on Arch there is
makepkgthat should never be executed as root, but does internally call some things with elevated privileges (mostlypacmanto install and remove packages). Currently it checks forsudoand if not falls back tosu, but maybe it might be worth considering changingsuforrun0if its guaranteed to be there.deleted by creator
How does doas differ from sudo?
Never heard of the former until now.
Essentially functionally stripped sudo, smaller in size than sudo. See also Pottering’s thoughts about the ecosystem
doasis quite popular in the BSD world, and was ported to Linux a few years ago (via the OpenDoas project).For starters, it’s is a lot smaller than sudo - under 2k lines of code vs sudo’s 132k - this makes it lot more easier to audit and maintain, and technically less likely to have vulnerabilities.
Another security advantage is that
doasdoesn’t pass on the environment variables by default (you’d have to explicitly declare the ones you want to pass, which you can do so in the config).The config is also a lot simpler, and doesn’t force you to use
visudo- which never made sense to me,visudoshould’ve just generated the actual config, instead of checking it after the fact. Kinda like howgrubbyorgrub2-mkconfigworks. But no need for that complexity with doas.Eg, the most basic
doasconfig could just have one line in the file:permit: wheel. Maybe have another line for programs you want to run without a password, likepermit nopass dexter cmd pacman.Awesome. Thanks for the insight.