Ubuntu 20.10 Moving Ahead In Restricting Access To dmesg

[nivedita]

You know what this decision will actually lead to? People will start using sudo for pretty much everything without thinking. If anything, limitations like this make security worse, not better. There's very little [security] info that can be picked from dmesg and then lots of data is still available using /proc, /sys and various kernel APIs.

For the longest time, the kernel's physical address was being logged in dmesg, for eg. That's only getting fixed for v5.8 [ETA: apparently it's now backported at least to v5.7.5]. God knows how many remaining instances of such info leaks are there.