On Friday, 14 February 2025 12:45:39 CST Darrick J. Wong wrote: > On Fri, Feb 14, 2025 at 12:13:03PM -0600, Elizabeth Figura wrote: > > On Friday, 14 February 2025 07:06:20 CST Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote: > > > On Fri, Feb 14, 2025 at 12:28:00PM +0000, Mike Lothian wrote: > > > > This allows ntsync to be usuable by non-root processes out of the box > > > > > > Are you sure you need/want that? If so, why? How did existing testing > > > not ever catch this? > > > > Hi, sorry, this is of course my fault. > > > > We do need /dev/ntsync to be openable from user space for it to be > > useful. I'm not sure what the most "correct" permissions are to have > > in this case (when we don't specifically need read or write), but I > > don't think I see a reason not to just set to 666 or 444. > > > > I originally assumed that the right way to do this was not to set the > > mode on the kernel file but rather through udev; I believe I was using > > the code for /dev/loop-control or /dev/fuse as an example, which both > > do that. So I (and others who tested) had just manually set up udev > > rules for this, with the eventual intent of adding a default rule to > > systemd like the others. I only recently realized that doing something > > like this patch is possible and precedented. > > > > I don't know what the best way to address this is, but this is > > certainly the simplest. > > Paranoid defaults in the kernel, and then a udev rule to relax the mode > at runtime. You could also have logind scripts to add add per-user > allow acls to the device file at user session set up time... or however > it is that /dev/sr0 has me on the allow list. I'm not sure how that > happens exactly, but it works smoothly. > > I get far less complaining about relaxing posture than tightening it > (==breaking things) after the fact. FWIW, it may be worth stressing that this is not a hardware device in any sense, it's a software driver that only lives in a char device (and dedicated module) for the sake of isolating the code. I can't imagine any reason to control access per-user, although my experience may not be enough to grant such imagination. The only actual risk is a bug in the code itself—which is always possible—but at that point you'd presumably just want to disable it at build time or something similar.
