this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2024
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The component that is like sudo in this case is polkit. Of course an unprivileged user can be used to run sudo commands as well, limited by the rules in the sudo config file, just as these polkit rules limit what the user can do...as long as there is no security issue in sudo and polkit respectively but the actual work is done by a privileged process that is merely controlled by the commands given by the unprivileged user.
Yes thats the point, the specific actions are a good way to act like a firewall for the access to the privileged process, invoked by anyone.
This is brilliant, as unprivileged users over ssh, or not even logged in, can invoke the updates in that case, making a "grandma pc" that is immutable and autoupdating possible.
See this discussion on how it would eventually be implemented