On Tue, 2012-07-03 at 13:30 -0500, Orin L. wrote: > Thanks David. > > So, assuming there's no unknown security "bug" in OpenConnect, running > it as root introduces no additional vulnerabilities to internet > threats? Right. Running as non-root ? or in the general case, running with no more privileges than are absolutely necessary ? is good security practice just in *case* there are bugs which allow an attacker to exploit the code in question. For example, when the Cisco client had? the stupid bug where it would open a fixed filename in /tmp (a failure of basic security knowledge on their part), it was made much *worse* because it was doing that as *root* and thus could be tricked into overwriting any file on the system. If it'd been doing it as a less privileged user, it wouldn't have been anywhere near so bad. > You mentioned that the Cisco client also runs as root. Is this true, > even though a connection could be established by running the gui as a > normal (non-root) user? The vpnagentd d?mon runs as root, and the 'vpn' and 'vpnui' clients will communicate with it. I suspect they communicate with it over a UNIX socket or something like that. > Finally, what's the recommended way to terminate a VPN session > initiated form OpenConnect? Ctrl-C? Yes. That will send a message to the server which will terminate the session, and then exit. If you want to quit in such a way that you can reconnect with the same cookie (and hence the same IP address), use SIGKILL instead. -- dwmw2 ? I say 'had'. For all I know, they might still have it. They never did respond coherently to the bug report, as far as I know. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature Size: 6171 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/openconnect-devel/attachments/20120703/fd1ee24b/attachment.bin>
