Slashdot Mirror
Torvalds Calls OpenSUSE Security 'Too Intrusive'
jfruh writes "The balance between security and ease of use is always a tricky one to strike, and Linux distros tend to err on the side of caution. But no less a luminary than Linus Torvalds thinks openSUSE has gone too far. When his kid needed to call from school for the root password just so he could add a printer to a laptop, that's when Linus decided things had gone off the rails."
Bah! Back in the day we recompiled the kernel to add a printer!
AND WE LIKED IT THAT WAY!!
I see this on Macs a lot. If you want to install anything, you have to type an administrator's password.
In theory, that's great. But in effect, you are giving that installer root access. So if I understand correctly, that installer could be putting any amount of spyware (or whatever) into your computer and nearly perfectly cover its tracks.
Otoh, many Mac apps are distributed as disk images, where you simply drag them from the image to your drive, and that's it. No password at all. If you're going to use pre-rolled software, that certainly seems more trustworthy. But of course, it is a lot more complicated of a process for the average user to be able to ever understand.
He could have just added the user to the sudo group and been done.
But no, he had to go harping on everyone on bug lists and social media rants to put people down, even suggesting whoever made the system should die.
What an ass.
B.S. in C.S., M.S. Psy., Ph.D. in C.S. and B.S.*, and my job is to fix the printer ...
* That's Brain Science, you r'tard
In other news, Linus has a child old enough to install printers on Linux ... I feel old.
I guess it's reasonable ... they use to say, "you're not dating girls until you're 21!"
Now it's "You can't have the root password until you're 21!"
By the way, Linus is right, I usually disable selinux ... a good firewall is fine ..., and
also if your child clicks on an attachment from a stranger, that's a grounding.
Maybe it's a nitpick, but if you employ quotation marks, you are denoting one of two things - sarcasm or direct quotation. Given the context, it does not appear to be sarcasm. RTFA shows that Torvalds did not use the words "too intrusive".
Sure, it's one somewhat questionable paraphrase of what he said, but to use quotation marks there is dishonest. His complaint was not even over the amount of effort, but rather of whom the effort was required. That is, non-root users were being required to know the root password for routine tasks.
Linus Torvalds is the Harlan Ellison of Linux.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
But... G+ is a ghost town? Just yesterday, people were saying, oh, gee, why would I even be interested in G+? Now /. is pulling stories directly from there.
Mmm Hmmm...
I8-D
Dude, he must be having some epic conversations with Wil Wheaton!
Thanks for reposting him on Slashdot otherwise no one else would've seen it.
It's a strange complaint seeing as how even with Windows, to install a new print driver, you have to have admin permissions or know the user id and password of a user with admin permissions. You can add all the printers you like providing the driver is installed, and it's no different for Linux distros.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Every time I use SUSE, it feel like every single thing about the system makes it geared towards controlled corporate deployments.
It's actually pretty good for that, but I can't understand for the life of me why someone would use it as a personal hacking system.
linux on a laptop he should be smart enough to be able to responsibly know and use the root password, he is Linus Torvalds kid for gosh sakes!
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
He has the knowledge to do the above, but he dedicates his time to developing the kernel, instead of configuring user-level stuff like printer installation UIs and stuff like that. He just relies on some distro, with it's general packaging of software, etc. This time, he just hit one with an anoying habbit of asking for a root password every five minutes. Lots of people can tweak it so it doesn't do that. But moving to a distro with saner defaults is just faster, and more efficient.
From Linus's post,
So here's a plea: if you have anything to do with security in a distro, and think that my kids (replace "my kids" with "sales people on the road" if you think your main customers are businesses) need to have the root password to access some wireless network, or to be able to print out a paper, or to change the date-and-time settings, please just kill yourself now. The world will be a better place.
This sounds like a post from an anonymous coward on Slashdot!
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
C'mon, all this buzz about a 4 line post on G+ ? It's not even silly season yet.
no that is what wanting a CS BS for a IT job gets you. People who think with know what it's like hands on.
Slashdot summary: "When his kid needed to call from school for the root password just so HE could add a printer to a laptop..."
From Linus: "And today Daniela calls me from school, because SHE can't add the school printer without the admin password."
try changing its IP address (yes, that architecture is still used in some places).
I dunno, some printer mfgs (on windows at least) install spyware along with
their driver. So, I don't think this (asking for a password) is necessarily bad, IMHO.
User's should be allowed to "change" /etc and other system-wide configuration settings.
I don't run SuSE (Fedora - but don't get me started on their latest distro - how do you break 'vi').
I don't think you can be too secure...
bu the point is, you shouldn't have to. Think about wider distribution, say.. 500 machines.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You insinuate that somehow his time is more valuable than anybody else's. Also there is push back from the OpenSUSE community that insist they like the current security defaults. Anyway I'm pretty sure he wasted more time writing his little rant than it would have taken to make it where his son could use a printer.
One could speculate that he is just demonstrating the consequences of not taking all of his opinions as gospel and giving it the upmost priority on bug tracker.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Linus's kid is a "she" not a "he"
"And today Daniela calls me from school, because she can't add the school printer without the admin password."
Back in my day, we copied pages by hand that we needed our own copies of. You're all a bunch of spoiled, lazy brats!
Now if you'll excuse me, I have a hill to go up in order to get home.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Linus' rather offensive hyperbole is unnecessary, even if he has a point. After a while people just stop listening.
I assume you would make a custom distribution with SUSE Studio and install it on all of your machines.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
From TFA:
"I gave OpenSUSE a try, because it worked so well at install-time on the Macbook Air, but I have to say, I've had enough. There is no way in hell I can honestly suggest that to anybody else any more.
Yes, that is so scary, oh noes, everyone who uses SUSE will run to other distros because Linus says so.
"I first spent weeks arguing on a bugzilla that the security policy of requiring the root password for changing the timezone and adding a new wireless network was moronic and wrong."
"So here's a plea: if you have anything to do with security in a distro, and think that my kids (replace 'my kids' with 'sales people on the road' if you think your main customers are businesses) need to have the root password to access some wireless network, or to be able to print out a paper, or to change the date-and-time settings, please just kill yourself now."
Crucial Conversations. Read it. Now. Please. Before speaking again.
Oh and Tanenbaum always much >>> than Linus.
The link between brackets notes that you're a bunch of years late for that joke. Don't worry, you can still be original by copying a recent troll post.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
I shouldn't have to add standard users to the sudoers group just so they can swap a friggin CD out!
Should someone be able to eject the CD that you're using while remotely logged into your computer using SSH?
I read that summary and only question coming to mind is 'when did Linus have a boy?'. Makes me feel like an airheaded fanboy :-(
You either use the web frontend for CUPS, in which case you're prompted for a password (either root or a user in a printer admin group)
Why can't each user have a separate set of printers and a separate printer admin group to manage his own printers? "Install this application or device just for me" is something that a lot of these multiuser operating systems have tended to neglect.
smooth.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
to install a new print driver, you have to have admin permissions
Having the ability to turn off user access to a feature does not make that an admin permission.
I'll bet his poor daughter rolled her eyes when he began ranting into the phone. Seriously, I see this with "smart" people from time to time. Just because you're smart, doesn't give you free reign to act like a dick and tell people to kill themselves. I think the problem with people with this sort of attitude is that they never had one person in their life stand up to them. When surrounded by ass kissers and zealots, it's easy to start believing your own hype.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Because just because a user has one of 100 shell accounts on a machine shouldn't entitle the user to waste the paper and ink of all the printers connected to the machine.
Installing additional hardware on a computer is most definately a function that SHOULD require administrative priviledges on a computer. Sounds like "working as intended".
I haven't done much configuration of desktop distros. Would OpenSUSE have a policy option like Windows does where you can grant install privileges to non-admin users for different types of device drivers?
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
only the person who mounted the CD should have permission to eject the CD.
I agree with this sentence, but I still need clarification: If two people are logged into a computer, and a CD is inserted, and the CD is mounted automatically, who mounted the CD?
http://xkcd.com/416/
Inspired by: <troll> Try Ubuntu </troll>
<troll> Try Minix 3.2.0 </troll> (humor).
SUSE Studio
SUSE Studio? Didn't Phil Collins write that song?
...that is what happens when a million monkeys write an OS and all think they can do it better then the next one.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
The point of having so many different flavors of linux is that you can pick one that you can like. For our tin foiled hat friend here, he can use this.
Sound like someone's using the wrong distro for the job.
If I were a windows guy and I were running Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition on my laptop, I think I'd be pretty annoyed at all the hoops I had to go through to change things too. Only that would not be Windows 2008 EE's fault now would it?
The real problem here is that devices in general which the user can muck with (USB devices, plugged in printers, network devices of all sorts for normal user activity) should not need to be run in a privileged mode.
Problem would then be trivially solved.
The real question is, why are printer drivers so privileged that "root" access is required? I assume they're no longer in the kernel; that's so last-cen. So why aren't they just applications in some directory owned by the "printer" user and managed by some utility that runs as that user?
You don't. The whole point of sudo is that it gives you fine-grained control over the privileges of each user.
I wouldn't call it fine grained.
Being physically in front of the computer should grant certain privileges (unless overridden), like mounting plug-in devices,
I taught my now ten year old to responsibly handle the root account on our systems at home.
Should he be raising his kids to be better admins?
It's like Henry Ford not giving his kid the keys to car...
I think Linus is referring to this bug report in his rant:
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=731812
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
African or European?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
It's not about "wasting time writing a rant", it's about encouraging discussion, getting the problem recognized by a bunch of different people, and fixing problems across a bunch of distros, one of which is opensuse. And yes, not all programmers are equal; his time is more valuable than many other's, maybe even yours; get over it.
I'm tired of hearing about Linus' inane ramblings about what's broken with various linux distros. It's not llike the guy sets the standard for distro design since he only developed the base kernel. Printers should be installed by administrators and not clueless end-users who will mess things up so it makes perfect sense to give printer installation and management to a higher priveleged user.
A non-privileged user can add, but not remove the printer. This is also a rpita. Try to tell the user which instance of the printer is the working one. Regedit does circumvent this issue of course. And your standard user can run regedit (which is of course very secure)./sarcasm
No, he's saying that a thousand users multiplied by 10 minutes is more valuable than one maintainer multiplied by 15 minutes.
I can't speak for developer goals, but that's not why I use it. I use it so that I never have to have a root shell open, which I might carelessly leave open, which is a small (depending on context) security vulnerability, and a large safety problem, since I could (again, carelessly) type the next few commands as root by accident.
Anyway, making any program setuid root increases the chances that anyone that can run it could get unlimited root access. sudo in particular has a history of problems with the "limited access" use case. It tends to give away more root than you might think, especially if the user is inclined to persist at trying to get it.
I'll grant that if you trust someone not to try to exploit your system, but you just don't think they need full root access, sudo is a convenient way to give them just what they need. I disagree that that's the "whole point", though. My policy is not to give out sudo privileges (however limited) to anyone I wouldn't trust with full root access.
You make a good point. So let me rephrase: How long will Apple continue to sell Mac computers for home use, such as the MacBook Air, Mac mini, and iMac, before replacing them with iOS devices such as the iPadBook, Apple TV 3, and televisions with integrated Apple TV 3? Such a move would push "development and content production" toward the MacBook Pro and Mac Pro.
everyone else that uses that machine
Which, in the case of a personal laptop, amounts to the null set.
In a lot of home environments, it isn't a personal laptop as much as a laptop on which mom and the kids take turns. I've seen this happen in two households within my extended family. So in this case, even a laptop is likely to be a multi-user machine.
Isn't that what ~/bin is for?
Then let me rephrase my comment: Multiuser operating systems' package management facilities have tended to neglect ~/bin. For example, notice that only a sudoer can usefully run Ubuntu Software Center.
The security model for Linux as a multiuser machine is getting in the way of its actual use pattern. And if Linus Torvalds can see this, why can't you?
There are two ways to implement the behavior that Linus seems to want on top of his security model. One is "install printer just for me" (driver goes into ~/bin); the other is "any user authorized to log in locally can install printers for all users" (printer admin group model). Which is better?
active desktop
For one thing, I thought we were talking about Linux, not Windows widgets :p For another, how do Linux and X implement Fast User Switching? However it works, there's probably a PolicyKit recipe that implements the desired behavior.
Its a laptop!
Yet it runs the same operating system as a workstation-server. How should the installer distinguish these use cases without presenting excessive questions to the user at install time?
... "One man's music is another man's noise." I'm not sure but what this feature might not warm the heart of many an enterprise admin struggling to enforce security in an environment of sprawling attack surfaces and wildly proliferating attack points.
The problem is that some people realise that linux sucks just after Linus realizes. That's sad.
Nope, I insinuate that he doesn't want to bother configuring these things, much like many other users don't want to, even though he *could* if he wanted to.
The ONLY way I could get it to print (we were using DOS 5.0 back then iirc) was to go DIRECT-TO-PORT (yes, even in a then "top-of-the-line" & yet affordable compiler, there was NO "print" command in it...
* I.E.-> I ended up doing a writeln (PASCAL analog to C printf basically) to the port (lpt1 &/or prn): It worked.
APK
In general, the difficult periods of life provide the best opportunities to gain useful experiences and develop inner strength. In America those members of the younger generation who have such an easy, comfortable life often find it difficult to face even small problems. They immediately start shouting
I don't want to be around, when Mr Torvalds has to face life's real problems.
The Admins are also wrong,
Unix security isn't just a topic of discussion and a bunch of tools, it's a set of rules and assumptions that thousands of people seem to agree upon.
* There are 2 security levels: root and user.
* A user cannot do things which could harm any other user or the system.
* Harmful behaviour is defined by root. It's a chain of trust like so: everyone else -> root -> user
(root guarantees to the rest of the network that they will not, and will not allow users to do anything bad)
* Changing system configuration is always defined as harmful behaviour
* The user who administers the system also has a root account, which is used with more care than their normal account.
* Installing hardware is per definition changing the system configuration and always requires root access.
* In a different world, it'd probably be logical to filter all except local network access by users as well, since only the admin can really be liable. But in todays internet where nobody seems to be liable for anything, we can safely ignore this restriction.
Things have changed since then, and the "system" is nowadays a portable computer where the only user is also the admin. And any case where the user isn't given a root account as well, in effect *reduces* security, since otherwise the user will just put the system-sensitive stuff in their home directory if they can.
Still, there's a very good reason for at least 2 different security levels, it means the system can protect you from yourself, using your own guidance.
Now, the topic of printers; printers are hardware devices, but don't always need installing to be used.
If your printer is a network printer, and all you require is sending it postscript/pcl/pdf via a network protocol, and your user has unhindered network access. No hardware installation is necessary, and printing requires the same privileges you enjoy while sending e-mail.
If your printer is a usb/parallel device and your operating system already knows how to talk to it, in theory you could by default allow any user to access it. But it would be a very stupid default since it cannot be known which users on the system should have access to it, this is best left for root to configure correctly.
If it's a winprinter (a printer which requires a program from a manufacturer) and connects via usb/parallel, it would most definitely need root to install, since only the admin can make any kind of correct judgement in this case.
However, I don't see a reason why a network connected winprinter should need root privileges (although it's very rare to find such installers) and print systems aren't pre-configured this way, nothing is stopping *you* from doing it right now on any fairly ordinary system.
Printing hardware is nowadays unique, in that most printers adhere to standards which has made it possible to seemingly "install hardware" without configuring a system. ;)
People who think it should always "just work" aren't considering all the security aspects.
What if your attacker, an industrial spy, plants a rootkit on your printer? that'd compromise all printed documents from other user accounts as well.
Actually, strike that. Never trust a network, not even your own, and you're safe
You can draw your own conclusions or you can take mine: They were wrong not give Linus' girl a root account on her laptop, but Linus is also wrong to demand system configuration without a root account.