Comment 112 for bug 13795

On Thu, Mar 31, 2005 at 06:16:46AM +1000, <email address hidden> wrote:
> Group staff is an anachronism: its ownership of /home is "wrong". Its use
> and usefulness should be reviewed.

An anachromism ? What paradigm shift made it "wrong" ?

> Group staff is said to be useful "for helpdesk types or junior sysadmins",
> without warnings that it is in fact root-equivalent.

Who said that ?

sg staff -c make install
and
su root -c make install

are very different security-wise. For once, the first will fail if we
mistakenly try to install in /usr instead of /usr/local.

> Use of root-equivalent users and groups may enlarge the attack surface.

There are a lot of them, though.

> If commonly used software allows breaching some security features, then
> the features need to be changed.

No security conscious person use NFS in a security sensitive context
anyway.

Cheers,
--
Bill. <email address hidden>

Imagine a large red swirl here.