[haileys]

This is like saying there’s no point having unprivileged users if you’re going to install sudo anyway.

The point is to escalate capability only when you need it, and you think carefully about it when you do. This prevents accidental mistakes having catastrophic outcomes everywhere else.

[jstimpfle]

I think sudo is a great example. It's not much more secure than just logging in at root. It doesn't really protect malicious attackers in practice. And it's more of an annoyance than it protects against accidental mistakes in practice.

[haileys]

Unsafe isn’t a security feature per se. I think this is where a lot of the misunderstanding comes from.

It’s a speed bump that makes you pause to think, and tells reviewers to look extra closely. It also gives you a clear boundary to reason about: it must be impossible for safe callers to trigger UB in your unsafe code.

[jstimpfle]

That's my point; I think after a while you instinctly repeat a command with sudo tacked on (see XKCD), and I wonder if I'm any safer from myself like that?

I'm doubtful that those boundaries that you mention really work so great. I imagine that in practice you can easily trigger faulty behaviours in unsafe code from within safe code. Practical type systems are barely powerful enough to let you inject a proof of valid-state into the unsafe-call. Making a contract at the safe/unsafe boundary statically enforceable (I'm not doubting people do manage to do it in practice but...) probably requires a mountain of unessential complexity and/or runtime checks and less than optimal algorithms & data structures.

[MaulingMonkey]

> That's my point; I think after a while you instinctly repeat a command with sudo tacked on (see XKCD), and I wonder if I'm any safer from myself like that?

We agree that this is a dangerous / security-defeating habit to develop.

If someone realizes they're developing a pattern of such commands, it might be worth considering if there's an alternative. Some configuration or other suid binary which, being more specialized or tailor-purpouse, might be able to accomplish the same task with lower risk than a generalized sudo command.

This is often a difficult task.

Some orgs introduce additional hurdles to sudo/admin access (especially to e.g. production machines) in part to break such habits and encourage developing such alternatives.

> unsafe

There are usually safe alternatives.

If you use linters which require you to write safety documentation every time you break out an `unsafe { ... }` block, and require documentation of preconditions every time you write a new `unsafe fn`, and you have coworkers who will insist on a proper soliloquy of justification every time you touch either?

The difficult task won't be writing the safe alternative, it will be writing the unsafe one. And perhaps that difficulty will sometimes be justified, but it's not nearly so habit forming.

[haileys]

What you postulate simply doesn’t match the actual experience of programming Rust

[tialaramex]

You are of course welcome to imagine whatever you want, but why not just try it for yourself?