bugGNU GRUB - Bugs: bug #34326, Ship a PolicyKit action to reboot...

 
 

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bug #34326: Ship a PolicyKit action to reboot into different OS

Submitter:  Andrew <and471>
Submitted:  Sun 18 Sep 2011 09:47:47 AM UTC
   
 
Category:  None Severity:  Major
Priority:  5 - Normal Item Group:  Feature Request
Status:  Wont Fix Privacy:  Public
Assigned to:  None Originator Name: 
Open/Closed:  Closed Release:  Bazaar - trunk
Release:  Reproducibility:  Every Time
Planned Release:  None

Wed 29 Feb 2012 08:05:22 PM UTC, comment #5: 

But this is not adding anything that a user cannot currently do.

It simply provides a piece of text and an explanation of what this action is doing, it doesn't mean bypassing sudo or anything.

For example, at the moment if I run

pkexec grub-reboot

It asks me for my password, and if the admin of this PC says so, then I can run /usr/sbin/grub-reboot as root

However if this file was shipped, everything would be the same, except that when the window popped up asking for my password, there would be an appropriate message there.

Andrew <and471>
Wed 29 Feb 2012 07:37:52 PM UTC, comment #4: 

"PolicyKit simply provides organisation and a means by which unprivileged users can perform privileged actions. "
"In short, it is a cool sudo :) "
This is exactly the problem. Allowing unprivilegied used to do something additional without admin consent is a bad thing. You always have to make a trade-off between security and convenience. While some distros are pretty convenient some other take a die-hard pro-security side and in upstream we shouldn't do anything to change it to more convenience, at least by default.
Also if we ship something like this we imply that using them is secure but in fact the background are scripts and programs which may have undiscovered security vulnerabilities.

Vladimir Serbinenko <phcoder>
Group administrator
Wed 29 Feb 2012 04:35:50 PM UTC, comment #3: 

Hi, is this going to get re-opened? You haven't responded to my comment.

Andrew <and471>
Wed 28 Sep 2011 03:41:34 PM UTC, comment #2: 

PolicyKit simply provides organisation and a means by which unprivileged users can perform privileged actions.

In short, it is a cool sudo :)

This does not mean however, that every user can do privileged actions, administrators can impose restrictions and in order to complete these actions, the user's password must be entered.

Shipping a PolicyKit action file would just streamline the process or using PolicyKit (provide a suitable name and description), and wouldn't add anything that couldn't currently be achieved.

Hopefully I have explained this well enough, but if I haven't please reply back and I will try harder :)

Andrew <and471>
Wed 28 Sep 2011 12:41:51 PM UTC, comment #1: 

I'm not familiar with PolicyKit but it's surely a bad idea to allow every user to be able to run grub-reboot by default (it's fine though if admin decides otherwise). I also think that the third party software shouldn't mess with security settings (it may provide examples though). Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong but if I understand the purpose of this file correctly it's a won't fix.

Vladimir Serbinenko <phcoder>
Group administrator
Sun 18 Sep 2011 09:47:47 AM UTC, original submission:  

grub-reboot is a great tool that grub ships, which makes it easy to reboot into a different OS, however one issue with it is that it requires root permissions to run.

PolicyKit overcomes this issue by allowing an unprivileged user run grub-reboot using pkexec, however to make the user experience more friendly, a .policy file should be shipped with grub, which provides a message and description of what the action does.

Attached is a PolicyKit action file already made for grub, all that needs to be done is for it to be shipped with grub, and installed into /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/

Andrew <and471>

 

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Attached Files
file #23989:  grub.grubreboot.policy added by and471 (721B - application/octet-stream)

 

Depends on the following items: None found

Items that depend on this one: None found

 

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    Follow 3 latest changes.

    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2011-09-28 phcoder StatusNone Wont Fix
        Open/ClosedOpen Closed
    2011-09-18 and471 Attached File- Added grub.grubreboot.policy, #23989

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