Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: Namespace for users created for packages

[Tom Wijsman]

On Wed, 26 Mar 2014 14:32:58 +0100
Michal Hrusecky <miska@g.o> wrote:

> Many packages need to add user and group names for their unprivileged
> daemons. Many names are short for convenience, e.g. 'pop', 'vdr',
> 'tor' or 'znc'. Since there is no separate name space for system
> users those names may collide with names of real persons. Sharing a
> user name between a system user and a normal user leads to surprising
> or even security relevant misbehavior as the daemon user may write to
> files in the real user's home or vice versa.
>
> Conclusion, in short, is to prefix system users (with some exceptions
> like root or nobody) with underscore '_'. So you would get users like
> '_pop', '_vdr', '_tor' or '_znc'. OpenBSD already does that[3].
> openSUSE proposal with more details can be seen on GitHub[4].
>
> So the question is, what would you think about such a policy in
> Gentoo?
>
> [1] http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2014-03/msg00333.html
> [2] http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-packaging/2014-02/msg00136.html
> [3]
> http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/~checkout~/ports/infrastructure/db/user.list?rev=HEAD;content-type=text%2Fplain
> [4]
> https://github.com/lnussel/osep_opensuse_usernames/blob/master/opensuse_usernames.txt

+1, it also helps spot the difference between normal users and those
that were made by the system; eg. `grep -v ^_ /etc/passwd` to only
quickly only list normal users there (while you have 'added by
portage' in this case you might not have that available in other cases).

-- 
With kind regards,

Tom Wijsman (TomWij)
Gentoo Developer

E-mail address  : TomWij@g.o
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