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

So my one question

[JoshuaZ]

Will this mean they'll need to update the xkcd shirts?

Most admins ignore sudo's granularity

[profplump]

Most admins ignore sudo's existing granularity, so why would they want an even more granular system? I'm not saying this new system has no uses -- clearly it does or no one would have built it -- but it's ridiculous to claim that it's likely to replace sudo in common usage when 75+% of admins have never changed the the default sudoers file, let alone wanted more even more granular control.

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