[PATCH 00/13] User support and client permissions

Stewart Smith stewart at linux.ibm.com
Fri Nov 23 11:46:28 AEDT 2018


Samuel Mendoza-Jonas <sam at mendozajonas.com> writes:
> There has been interest in having methods to "lock down" Petitboot for a
> while now (existing changes like restricting access to the shell,
> requested features such as adding a big "Password" screen before being
> able to do anything), and this makes a big jump in that direction as
> part of the overall journey to trusted/secure boot.
>
> Rather than rely on implementing a bunch of password checks in ncurses
> and keeping the user from getting shell access this instead leans on
> having Linux do it for us for the most part by running all user facing
> parts of Petitboot as an unprivileged user, with only pb-discover and
> its utilities running with root permissions. Assuming the environment
> has been set up correctly this means that when a user drops to the shell
> they are completely unprivileged unless they know the root password.

I'm just thinking how this would interact with op-test, we *may* not
currently do the "su" thing correctly (or we might... it'd be good to
check though).

Maybe for some backwards-compat, if we don't have a root password,
exiting to a shell should automatically "su" you to root?

-- 
Stewart Smith
OPAL Architect, IBM.



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