[systemd-devel] Is there a reason to run systemd Units with root access?

[Lennart Poettering]

On Tue, 04.07.17 20:33, Mariusz Wojcik (M6Wojcik at outlook.com) wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I’m just asking because of the latest “not-a-bug” [1]. As far as I
> know, there aren’t many services that need full root access (maybe
> for getting a low port number). Except for that I don’t see many use
> cases. Therefore, I think it would be useful to make the decision
> for root access more explicit, e.g. User=root is needed to start
> units as root. Also I don’t think it is a sane default is to start
> any unit as root when there is no valid User property. Even the
> security of systemd would benefit because it would save people from
> accidentally running services as root.

Well, UNIX system services traditionally expect to be invoked as "root",
and then drop privs on their own, if they are well written, and
systemd was created to run UNIX system services, hence the default.

But yeah I think today it would be better for services to just let
systemd drop privs for them wherever possible. But it's hard to get
that into people's heads, and it needs to be done on a per-service
basis, so that the right user is used, and the right execution
parameters (for example ambient caps) are passed otherwise.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat