this post was submitted on 09 May 2024
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This just sounds like a bad idea, a solution in search of a problem. Sure, sudo is a setuid binary, but it's a fairly simple program, and at some point, you have to trust the code. It's also a very fundamental piece of the system that you want to always work, even (especially!) when other things get borked. The brief description of run0 already has too many potential points of failure.
Some people would disagree to this.
If the "listener" is PID1, which will run the privileged command, in theory, it would be quite bullet proof (in a working system PID1 is always there). But since this is systemd, PID1 is much more than that and much more complex. On the other hand spawning another daemon from PID1 to be the "listener" makes it, perhaps, even more complicated. You'd have to make sure the listener is always running and have some process supervisor there to watch if it exits... and maybe even a watchdog polling it to make sure it isn't frozen.
So my conclusion is the same as yours:
We already have a working solution. Have a well written SUID program. I've been using doas for some years now. It's simple enough that I trust it.
I've always wondered why we even bother with SUID commands. Why not just log in as root?
Yeah. I keep one root tmux session open on my main PC for administrative tasks.