On Wed, 26 Mar 2014 14:32:58 +0100 Michal Hrusecky <mi...@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Many packages need to add user and group names for their unprivileged > daemons. Many names are short for convenience, e.g. 'pop', 'vdr', > 'tor' or 'znc'. Since there is no separate name space for system > users those names may collide with names of real persons. Sharing a > user name between a system user and a normal user leads to surprising > or even security relevant misbehavior as the daemon user may write to > files in the real user's home or vice versa. > > Conclusion, in short, is to prefix system users (with some exceptions > like root or nobody) with underscore '_'. So you would get users like > '_pop', '_vdr', '_tor' or '_znc'. OpenBSD already does that[3]. > openSUSE proposal with more details can be seen on GitHub[4]. > > So the question is, what would you think about such a policy in > Gentoo? > > [1] http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2014-03/msg00333.html > [2] http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-packaging/2014-02/msg00136.html > [3] > http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/~checkout~/ports/infrastructure/db/user.list?rev=HEAD;content-type=text%2Fplain > [4] > https://github.com/lnussel/osep_opensuse_usernames/blob/master/opensuse_usernames.txt +1, it also helps spot the difference between normal users and those that were made by the system; eg. `grep -v ^_ /etc/passwd` to only quickly only list normal users there (while you have 'added by portage' in this case you might not have that available in other cases). -- With kind regards, Tom Wijsman (TomWij) Gentoo Developer E-mail address : tom...@gentoo.org GPG Public Key : 6D34E57D GPG Fingerprint : C165 AF18 AB4C 400B C3D2 ABF0 95B2 1FCD 6D34 E57D
