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Is there an advantage of using doas over sudo
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2024
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When I thought about this question, I decided to ditch both sudo and doas entirely. I am certain this is an unpopular opinion, but I preferred setting up a granular permission + user system instead, and keeping root privileges for only a handful of use cases (primarily for system updates and package installations).
For anything else, a dedicated user is created, and given only permissions to do that exact thing only. Many of these users have no shell access at all, and for the ones that do, I use a password manager so I don't have to memorize passwords for all of these users.
Why would a system update need privileges? What is the privileged action in pulling and applying updates your distro ships?
I mean, that's one of the things that definitely needs permissions, right? You're overwriting system config and executables for all users on your system. Otherwise a malicious actor could just replace firewall configs, or embed malicious code into your executables. If not /bin and /etc what else should need privileges?
On a mutable distro maybe but also no. You need to update your system, always. The updates come from the distro, and you only invoke your privileged package manager to do these changes for you. Its not privileged.
If a malicious actor is able to replace package repos that your package manager uses, for example an infected server in the same network, this would be the only way to inject arbitrary stuff by using
dnf updateorrpm-ostree update.Installing software and updating the already existing is very different.