[PATCH 00/13] User support and client permissions

Samuel Mendoza-Jonas sam at mendozajonas.com
Tue Nov 27 13:55:29 AEDT 2018


On Mon, 2018-11-26 at 11:36 +1100, Samuel Mendoza-Jonas wrote:
> On Fri, 2018-11-23 at 11:46 +1100, Stewart Smith wrote:
> > 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?
> > 
> 
> I think op-test just uses 'sudo' which we're unlikely to have. Good idea,
> I'll have a look at adding a check in the drop-to-shell logic.
> 

This is probably better handled in the Buildroot side of things, for
example here in the .shrc as the shell starts:
https://github.com/sammj/op-build/blob/users/openpower/package/petitboot/shell_config

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