Be Using Rootless Containers(blog.miguelgrinberg.com) |
Be Using Rootless Containers(blog.miguelgrinberg.com) |
For one, as non-root user you are tied to the permissions system and can't access most of the data. If one of your services (let's say sql) get hacked, they are tied to sql user, and unless the achieve privilege escalation, they can't mangle with other services data (eg webserver).
Also network wide, a non-root user can't use different protocol than tcp and udp. The only reason you can ping as a regular user is because of the setuid on the ping program, otherwise icmp is not allowed to non-root users.
There are of course other reasons, but these are some examples on how it would be different.
With root, I can read all program memory, try to extract decryption keys for encrypted filesystems, modify the kernel, punch open backdoors, modify any arbitrary program, read all user files, etc.
A notable extra issue is the rise of AI agents, which often eagerly test the boundaries of every sandbox they are placed within. I would not run an AI agent as root, nor would I give it full access to a rootful container runtime.
Yes, of course there are still users out there that execute all software under the same account.
Inability to use the tools at hand to protect your data is not a technical issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing#Security
Read up on basic user based security. Multiple users can exist on a system, each with its own resources, root/admin can effectively affect any user, so breaking the user-root barrier could allow a user to affect other users.
Originally users meant actual people, but in modern systems users can belong to subsystem, so for example an HTTP server with a website may have its own user, but a mail system could have another, so a breach in the website system would be confined to said user. Going from user to root is called a Local Privilege Escalation and would allow a breach from the website to metastasize into the mail system.
Are people really terminally online enough to understand this?
OpenMandriva would be my next guess, but it's not a newer distro.
A blog post talking about security but refusing to mention which operating was vulnerable to an exploit out of virtue signaling(?) is absurdist comedy.
If the author is referring to Omarchy, should we also stop using and mentioning Ruby on Rails? Preposterous.
The main risk (for you, mere human without a 100M$ budget) is that it downloads a compromised package or vulnerability, or that it runs a stray rm -rf or some stupid stuff. A user provides reasonable protection, you don't NEED a vm (and even then that can be escaped).
Apart from rootkit and backdoors that are more difficult to install as non-root, you cannot build specific tunnels as you don't have network permissions.
There are some user space network capabilities, but they are easily breaking, or discovered and in general not resilient to simple reboots. This is one of the reasons you shouldn't leave your client 24/7 on.
But without root access a virus wouldn't be able to affect system files, so it would have much less persistence and would be much easier for it to be removed, even automatically by some built in or third party antivirus.
Or, it might be possible to just remove it by making a separate user, and accessing the files of the older user from a folder.
In personal cellphones, also, there's heavy sandboxing, so in an OS like android, there would be a big difference betwen root and app compromise, if you don't get root you are only able to access the app data of the app you compromise.
Similar in Mac I think, but I'm not an expert, each app is isolated and a process from one app can only access its own data, escalating to root would allow affecting files of other apps.
But we are talking about containers, so in all likelihood this is about either servers or server developers, which make heavy use of separate users for even single use stuff like an HTTP server, whether manually or automatically, run 'apt/yum install apache2' and you'll see how it creates a separate user automatically.
Yes, root still matters.
Is racism/aversion to it a uniquely American phenomenon?