[eep_social]

Right, I’d speculate that removing sudo for doas is a heavy but feasible lift at the distro level. But as I said elsethread, I’m also very interested in an as-safe-as-possible replacement between now and then. Removing the need entirely (as they are both conceptually broken) seems like a huge lift that’s probably not feasible without fundamental changes. Could it be done within POSIX? IDK but I’d guess not.

[cedws]

>Removing the need entirely (as they are both conceptually broken) seems like a huge lift that’s probably not feasible without fundamental changes

A sort of workaround is that you can log in as the desired user from a TTY. Of course, this gets tricky if you don't have physical access or a remote serial connection. And you probably wouldn't want to log in as root over SSH. I don't have real solutions in mind but it's ticking over in my head. Might have some ideas later on.

[eep_social]

Aye, but then we are (I think) sharing credentials so we can both log in as the user with specific (read: elevated) permissions, and we lose any ability to know who the “real” person-user is on top. So it’s a different problem and we’re starting to talk about threat models and such..

[cedws]

> we lose any ability to know who the “real” person-user is on top

It's a complex topic probably best suited for discussion elsewhere, but do we even need to discern that anymore? Statistically most Linux systems running now are single-seat (as in, one real user).

A big corp with thousands of servers and employees might want to know this stuff for audit logging, but if employees have root access, they can already fake everything at ring 3. Big corps use security software that do that stuff in ring 0.

[e12e]

> if employees have root access

The main usecase of sudo over su (or suid binaries) is limited access (clear/re-run the mail queue - not reconfigure the mail daemon)

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> Right, I’d speculate that removing sudo for doas is a heavy but feasible lift at the distro level.

Not that heavy a lift, at least as a default. AIUI Alpine switched to doas and moved sudo to the community repo, Arch supports both, Void supports both, and NixOS supports both. I wouldn't be surprised if there are more. Although, RHEL and SUSE would probably have a harder time because their customers are more likely to use sudo's long tail of features.

[eep_social]

I’m only vaguely aware of Alpine but that’s pretty neat!