Some privilege reduction patches

[Martin Pitt]

Hi Richard!

Richard Hughes [2006-02-15  9:26 +0000]:
> On 14/02/06, Martin Pitt <martin at piware.de> wrote:
> > Also, it is now reasonable to run some of the helpers with reduced
> > privileges. E. g. the ACPI helper doesn't need root privileges since
> > it can happily read from acpid. This even helps to prevent some race
> > conditions between acpid and hal which apparently crash acpid in
> > Debian in some cases.
> 
> What if you don't have acpid installed? I know a few people (myself
> included) who run hald without acpid, as acpi events are not being
> used by anything else. Wouldn't dropping the privileges stop the addon
> from reading /proc/acpi/event ?

Right, it would. As I said, these are only experimental patches for
now.

It seems that there should be a check:

 * If the acpid.socket exists, then the helper should drop privs and
   use it.

 * Otherwise it should open the kernel interface directly and drop
   privs after that (and just keep the open file descriptor around).

Martin
-- 
Martin Pitt        http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer   http://www.ubuntu.com
Debian Developer   http://www.debian.org

In a world without walls and fences, who needs Windows and Gates?
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