[pacman-dev] Adding privilege levitation to pacman

[Eli Schwartz]

On 1/4/21 1:46 PM, Emil Velikov via pacman-dev wrote:
> After a casual chat with some systemd and dbus devs - I was pointed at polkit.
> With polkit a) gaining and revoking root is trivial, b) it integrates
> nicely (better than gpg/pinentry) with tty, gnome, kde, etc, while it
> also c) provides for a consistent user experience.

"pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-curses" integrates very nicely with 
the tty too, and is apropos for not context-switching between a terminal 
emulator running in a WM, and some popup window.

I'm not aware of a similar option for polkit, it would likely defeat the 
purpose of most polkit uses though...

> I'm not sure if you're joking or trolling here. I am aiming for "least
> privilege", moving from yaourt which absolutely sucks in that
> department, with pacman being a tiny bit better.

I don't see how yaourt is tied to principle of least privilege. Neither 
with yaourt, nor without yaourt, do you have principle of least privilege.

> Last but not least, to reiterate pacman will work as original when the
> system lacks polkit all together.

No it won't... because you need to link to libpolkit-agent in order to 
support it, therefore it's a compile-time choice whether the "pacman" 
package depends on the "polkit" package.

You could circumvent this by using exec(2) + /usr/bin/pkexec on the 
whole process, or if, like systemd, you *already* contain a dbus 
implementation that can send messages to org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1 
without linking to polkit.

-- 
Eli Schwartz
Bug Wrangler and Trusted User

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