Systemd 241 Paired With Linux 4.19+ To Enable New Regular File & FIFO Protection

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Systemd 241 Paired With Linux 4.19+ To Enable New Regular File & FIFO Protection

The Linux 4.19 kernel brought the ability to disallow the opening of FIFOs and regular files not owned by the user in world-writable sticky directories in the name of security. Had this ability been around previously it could have prevented a number of CVEs going back a long time. In helping ensure this functionality gets utilized, Systemd 241 will now set these sysctl options to enable the behavior by default...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...nux-419-Sysctl

[jacob]

I never understood why should FIFOs (and local sockets, for that matter) be allowed anywhere in the main filesystem tree. By definition they are transient objects that cannot survive across reboots and shoud have no business living in a storage space designed for persistent objects. The only legitimate place for them IMHO is under /run

[mzs.112000]

I never understood why should FIFOs (and local sockets, for that matter) be allowed anywhere in the main filesystem tree. By definition they are transient objects that cannot survive across reboots and shoud have no business living in a storage space designed for persistent objects. The only legitimate place for them IMHO is under /run

Doesn't Linux share the UNIX philosophy that "everything is a file"? Which would mean that everything belongs in some kind of filesystem tree?

[bitman]

Doesn't Linux share the UNIX philosophy that "everything is a file"? Which would mean that everything belongs in some kind of filesystem tree?

And this philosophy is so overused that it collapses soon enough when we need to read something from /sys or /proc.. Everyone is implementing parsing of same text files over and over to get data that should be binary to begin with.

[jacob]

Doesn't Linux share the UNIX philosophy that "everything is a file"? Which would mean that everything belongs in some kind of filesystem tree?

"Everything is a file" is one of the very few aspects of UNIX which are actually intelligent. But that doesn't mean that everything should be a *persistent* file. Many types of objects are inherently transient and creating persistent, reboot-resistant names on disk for such objects that may or may not actually exist when accessed is plain stupid. They should be visible as files, but in a special purpose, non persistent directory and only as long as they are actually usable (e.g. as long as some process is actually reading from the FIFO, or listens on a socket). And since we are at it, why on Earth are IP sockets not represented as files too?

[monraaf]

"Doesn't Linux share the UNIX philosophy that "everything is a file"? Which would mean that everything belongs in some kind of filesystem tree?"

That used to be the unix philosphy until systemd come and destroyed it all.

At this point I no longer value Linux over Microsoft Windows because that is basically what they made out of it with pulseaudio + systemd.

Our only salvation is Slackware and the BSDs, make sure systemd, shim and their kind never even get a foothold in BSD land EVER!

[pkunk]

Our only salvation is Slackware and the BSDs, make sure systemd, shim and their kind never even get a foothold in BSD land EVER!

https://wiki.freebsd.org/launchd

[starshipeleven]

Our only salvation is Slackware and the BSDs, make sure systemd, shim and their kind never even get a foothold in BSD land EVER!

*Alpine Linux, Artix (Arch/OpenRC), Gentoo and any other distro using or offering OpenRC.

[starshipeleven]

And this philosophy is so overused that it collapses soon enough when we need to read something from /sys or /proc.. Everyone is implementing parsing of same text files over and over to get data that should be binary to begin with.

but... but... shell scripting!

/sarcasm

[discordian]

Actually, you dont need to be using 4.19, this change is backported to all still supported LTS versions.