Somebody call the Wahhhmbulance. This guy is outmoded. How about expanded security permissions for small groups of people in a larger directory? How about PAM auth plugins? How about escalation preventiontion for those same people, PLUS auditing instead of just seeing “root did something dumb”.
I don’t even get why this gent even bothered to wine and complain about this except that he doesn’t “get it”. This has been a solved issue for over 20 years now, and you don’t see large swathes of folks bitching and moaning about sudo at all.
If you need to provide tools that cross security boundaries then […] a small web app is better [than sudo].
A web app? Effin really!!? 🤨
This is the part that confused me most. At the first mention of web apps, I just thought, okay, if you have a web server you can have it run under a service account that can do what it needs to do. Sure. Kind of beside the point, but sure.
Then this came at the end and and I did a double-take. He’s really suggesting a web app as a substitute for sudo in general? Two questions:
- Wat?
- Wut?
I feel like an important thing he forgot to mention though is that it lets you allow multiple users to have root privileges without having to share passwords or SSH keys
Why would they need to share ssh keys? Ssh will happily accept dozens of allowed keys.
Sudo and doas are 1000x (in loc) more complex than they need to be for destop pc. Yet they are always default installed and some tools even expect them.
edit: didn’t know that doas is that small. I thought it has ~1/10 of sudo’s code but it’s actually ~2k vs. 132k of sudo.