PlanetLab Creates a More Advanced Sudo

angry tapir writes "Researchers at the PlanetLab global research network have developed a potential replacement for the widely used Unix sudo tool, called Vsys, that will offer administrators far greater control over what end users can and can't access. Vsys is similar to sudo, except it offers finer-grained access to system resources. PlanetLab created Vsys as a way to allow its researchers to access low-level network functionality so they could develop new network technologies — overlay networks, user-level file systems, virtual switches — while their experimental work remained safely isolated from other users."

Comments

Re:I don't need more.

[SigmundFloyd]

I know what sudo does.

If you knew what sudo does, you wouldn't have written this:

"su -c $blah" should be all anyone needs.

Subject to race conditions -- lame

[plsuh]

Folks,

Does no one remember 2007? Bob Watson presented a paper on exploiting concurrency to break all kinds of things like systrace back then, complete with example code. Vsys is the same kind of thing -- it has processes executing in an outside space where you can have a race condition and force the parameters to change after the clearance check but before it actually does the work. See:

http://www.watson.org/~robert/2007woot/

--Paul