this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023

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The First Stable Release of a Memory Safe sudo Implementation (www.memorysafety.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It might be a drop in replacement to sudo, but I would not use it as such for a while. If you look at the bugs that sudo had over the years, only a fraction of them have been caused by unsafe memory operations. The majority has been caused be its own complexity and the complexity of the sudoers file. These problem classes are not going away by porting the tool over to Rust or any other language. Since this is a rewrite, it will have its own security bugs that need to be found and fixed first. So until sudo-rs has had a couple of years of people fixing security issues, I'd rather not adopt it.

Given that, I have a hard time imagining why someone would pour time and resources into a rewrite of sudo for years to come instead of working towards a simpler solution.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There was a nice talk at RustNL from the creators about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4vwJIO96Yo

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=o4vwJIO96Yo

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Cool, but I'll stick with opendoas

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If that works for you and you are happy with it, fine. But sudo-rs seems to have a bit of a different usecase since it is intended as a drop in replacement for sudo, hence it must be able to handle the sudoers file aso. It still removes some of the never-used obscure functionality that sudo had, so it is probably a lot smaller code base than original sudo.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

But sudo-rs seems to have a bit of a different usecase since it is intended as a drop in replacement for sudo, hence it must be able to handle the sudoers file aso.

Other than being yet another "standard tool X clone written in Rust" project, does it actually provide any tangible value?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Does it have to?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Does it have to?

If you're a developer looking for a pastime working on a personal project, no. You're free to waste your time and effort doing anything that pleases you.

Everyone else in the world only bothers with something if it provides any value at all. If a project such as this one fails to provide any value them no one will have any reason to waste their time with it, no matter how many times you rewrite it in Rust.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I'm with you. Potential memory safety is the benefit that people should care about. But, the original sudo has been around for so long that I imagine the memory safety is already pretty well hashed out. I believe that there are speed benefits to some of the random applications re-written in rust. But, I don't see how something like sudo would have any benefit.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What advantages does that have over this?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Opendoas has a significantly smaller codebase. It only has 4397 lines of code compared to Sudo-rs's staggering 35990 lines.
It has a very simple config file which can do everything I want in less than 6 words.
It is a soft fork of BSD's doas package and receives frequent audits(something I find reassuring since it is a method to gain root access on my system.
I don't want or need 99% of the features sudo provides so I appreciate the simplicity and lightness of opendoas

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Opendoas has a significantly smaller codebase. It only has 4397 lines of code compared to Sudo-rs’s staggering 35990 lines.

Hmm.

% tokei src | rg ' (Language|Total)'
 Language            Files        Lines         Code     Comments       Blanks
 Total                  76        16243        13468          682         2093

% tokei src test-framework | rg ' (Language|Total)'
 Language            Files        Lines         Code     Comments       Blanks
 Total                 196        34274        27742         1072         5460

% git grep '#\[cfg(test)\]' src |wc
     40      44    1387

I too love making unaware "Tests Considered Harmful" arguments based on some blind analysis.

Funnily enough, one could easily do some actually potentially useful shallow analysis, instead of a completely blind one, simply by noticing the libc crate dependency, then running:

git grep -Enp -e libc:: --and --not -e '(libc::(c_|LOG)|\b(type|use)\b)'

Ignoring the usage in test modules, use of raw libc appears to be more than you would think from the title. One can also argue that some of that usage would be better served by using rustix instead of raw libc.

Of course authors can counter with arguments why using rustix* is not feasible or would complicate things, and would argue that the use of unsafe+libc is required for this kind of project, and it's still reasonably limited and contained.

And a little bit more informed back-and-forth discussion can go from there.

* Searching for rustix in the sudo-rs repo returned this. So this predictably has been brought up before.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'm sorry but I don't understand whatever argument you're making. I did the line count on my phone via termux because I was in a rush, so i'm aware the counts may be inaccurate. I should have made that clear in my earlier reply.

I do, however, hold to the fact that any sudo implementation will be more complicated than doas. Sudo, as a project, has more options and usecases than doas so it also has more posibilities for bugs or misconfiguration for the user.

I'm unable to tell what codebase your are refering to with you're grep arguments, sorry.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I do, however, hold to the fact that any sudo implementation will be more complicated than doas. Sudo, as a project, has more options and usecases than doas so it also has more posibilities for bugs or misconfiguration for the user.

Fair.

I’m unable to tell what codebase your are refering to with you’re grep arguments, sorry.

sudo-rs