[barrow-rider]

> "systemd" is always spelled lowercase. The 'd' doesn't stand for something and is never capitalized.

I thought the 'd' was a holdover from "daemon", as in initd or setsid, as a general name for a background process. systemd is a little more than just a background process but it's sort of the same idea.

From the wiki page: "In a strictly technical sense, a Unix-like system process is a daemon when its parent process terminates and the daemon is assigned the init process (process number 1) as its parent process and has no controlling terminal. However, more generally a daemon may be any background process, whether a child of the init process or not. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(computing)

[TheDong]

From their documentation [0]:

> Yes, it is written systemd, not system D or System D, or even SystemD .... [You may also, optionally] call it (but never spell it!) System Five Hundred since D is the roman numeral for 500 (this also clarifies the relation to System V, right?).

The 'd' is a pun on both daemons typically being postfixed with 'd' and on the roman numeral for '500'. It does not directly stand for either though officially.

[0]: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/

[raverbashing]

While naming trivia is interesting, it is a fact that systemd has had its fair share of security problems. And while it is a fact that OpenSSH is more mature, systemd has some issues with recognizing security failures as such https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/6mykng/that_systemd_...

[TheDong]

That is a perfect example of security FUD around systemd.

The attack vector is what? Someone manages to convince an administrator to write a service that has "User=0foo" in it?

If an attacker has access to write into `/etc/systemd/system` then they already have root on the system.

If an attacker can cause an administrator to write a systemd unit and the administrator isn't checking that it's reasonable, the attacker could just have the `ExecStart` line run a 'sploit and not have a `User` line at all.

Seriously, what is the attack that you imagine where this has a security impact?

As Poettering said on that issue, no one should be running system services as usernames starting with numbers, and that's questionably valid in the first place.

People still have blown it out of proportion because it's systemd.

Note that a similar issue exists in the old sys-v init scripts: they run as root, and if you convince a person writing a sys-v init script to exclude the `start-stop-daemon -u username` flag, then the daemon will run as root. Basically identical, but never assigned a CVE because no one seriously considers "I talked my sysadmin into running something as root" by itself a privilege escalation.