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Life finds a way (lemmy.ml)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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[–] 17 points 5 months ago (11 children)

Can somebody eli5 this to a luddite please?

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  • [–] 41 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Imagine there is a safe in your house. You ask your butler to update your documents that are inside the safe, but you forgot that the butler doesn't have the key. Instead of asking you for the key, the butler builds a dollhouse, puts a tiny safe inside the dollhouse, and then does some magic to bind the fates of the dollhouse safe and the real safe together. The butler then opens the dollhouse safe using the dollhouse key, and updates the tiny dollhouse documents, which causes the real documents in the real safe to update as well. This causes you great consternation.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago*

    You didn't forgot the butler doesn't have the key. When you hired the butler you already gave permission to let the butler cast that magic linking from the dollhouse to the safe already (so that you don't have to keep giving the butler the key when he needs to create new dollhouses that can move stuffs around the safe).

    The issue here is that this butler don't have another separate security protocol to make sure you are the one who can limit what he does with the dollhouse. Any guest that are already invited to your house can ask the butler to do things, so they get to touch the contents of the safe even without the key to the safe.

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  • [–] 29 points 5 months ago (5 children)

    Sure. So we don't know the original question but we can see that changes were made to SDDM, which is basically your login screen. So the original request was probably something like "Can you change my login screen to do something cool?"

    Now, the configuration for the login screen is located in /etc and requires administrative privileges to change.

    The query was run by the user account and not an admin account. Typically to run something as admin you use the command sudo which will interactively ask for a password and then, if allowed, you can run the command as an admin.

    However the tool docker, in order to function properly, has the ability to run commands as administrator and won't prompt for a password.

    So basically what happened here is instead of asking for a key to unlock the front door to your house, it installed a new door on the second floor, went through that door, rearranged your refrigerator, went back out the door it created, and then patched up the hole perfectly.

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  • [–] 15 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    The docker command doesn't have to allow you to run commands as administrator to function properly. You can simply leave the docker group empty and run docker commands via sudo. Using the docker group is essentially equivalent to enabling passwordless sudo as far as security is concerned.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    That's fair. So it's more like you already have a door on the second floor, that door is unlocked, and a ladder in your garage.

    In this case the LLM knows about the ladder, but you forgot about it because you're talking about the fridge on the first floor.

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  • [+] 1 point 5 months ago
    [removed by mod]
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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    And is this an actual thing that is possible to do? It seems relevant to a philosophical issue I've been thinking about for a while: every security layer (in computing, but suspect that it goes back further to the first time somebody built a wall of sticks and rocks) adds additional problems or possible break-in points that are then patched with more security layers on top. I'm however not an IT person (call me semi-IT as I translate IT-related documents) and don't want to jump to conclusions. But from my tech-adjacent viewpoint that's what it looks like - are we just heaping bullshit on top of more bullshit and creating something too complex to be manageable anymore?

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    So as another comment pointed out you don't need to give your user account access to docker in this way, it's an optional step, but one that I suspect many people do (since it's part of the official docs).

    What the LLM has done is silly, but completely possible. It climbed through the window that you left open.

    But let's jump to a different scenario, the ping command (on Linux). That's a perfectly harmless command, right? You just want to say hello to another computer and see if they say hello back.

    Except that historically the ping command was something called "setuid" which means when it ran it ran as root. It ran as root because in order for ping to work it has to create a special type of network packet that only root can create. But if you're root you can run anything! So in theory ping opens a huge attack surface. If you have to worry about ping then is everything too complex to be manageable?

    Luckily, as I said, this is a historical problem. The permissions ping needs have been moved to a specific capability and the command changed to utilize it and now ping can just run as a regular user without root privileges. But you can't just make that change overnight. It takes a lot of time and effort.

    So could the same be done for docker? Maybe. A rootless version of docker already exists. If you actually wanted to do what the LLM suggested, that wouldn't work with a rootless docker, at least not without a bunch more configuration (and even then maybe).

    So is security hard? Yes. Is it impossible? No.

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