Re: CVE-2021-4034: why is pkexec still a thing?

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Hi Adam,

also gvfs uses pkexec currently to start gvfsd-admin backend...

Regards

O.

st 26. 1. 2022 v 23:39 odesílatel Adam Williamson
<adamwill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> napsal:
>
> Hi folks!
>
> For anyone who hasn't seen it yet - there's quite a kerfuffle today
> about a major security issue in polkit:
>
> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/01/a-bug-lurking-for-12-years-gives-attackers-root-on-every-major-linux-distro/
>
> turns out that ever since it was invented, `pkexec` has had a bug
> allowing for local root privilege escalation. Which is...bad.
>
> The issue and some of the comments around it prompted me to wonder -
> why is `pkexec` still a thing? Particularly, why is it still a thing we
> are shipping by default in just about every Fedora install?
>
> My best recollection is that pkexec was kinda a kludge to allow us to
> get rid of consolehelper: some apps weren't getting rewritten to the
> Right Way of doing things under policykit, they still just wanted to
> have the entire app run as root, and pkexec was a way to make that
> happen.
>
> But that was then, and this is now. Does anything in Workstation use
> pkexec? Does anything in KDE use it? I'm pretty sure (at least I really
> hope!) nothing in Server uses it. I don't think any of our
> documentation recommends its use for interactive execution of things as
> root (these days we tend to just specify `sudo` for that and assume the
> install has an admin user).
>
> Should we just split it out of the polkit package into a subpackage and
> stop shipping the subpackage on those editions/spins at least? If
> there's anything in other desktops still using it, it can grow a
> dependency on the subpackage...
>
> Am I forgetting some other reason we still need it?
> --
> Adam Williamson
> Fedora QA
> IRC: adamw | Twitter: adamw_ha
> https://www.happyassassin.net
>
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