Re: [Gimp-user] The GIMP opens in superuser mode

[Liam R E Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Thu, 2018-04-05 at 23:40 -0400, Steve Kinney wrote:
> On 04/05/2018 09:41 PM, Liam R E Quin wrote:
> > On Thu, 2018-04-05 at 20:42 -0400, Steve Kinney wrote:
> > > It /should/ be impossible for a program opened by a 'regular'
> > > user to
> > > run in superuser mode, unless the regular user enters the root
> > > password.
> >
> > It can happen if the program's binary is owned by the root user and
> > is
> > mode u+s (set-userid).
> >
> > Liam (ankh)
>
> Yikes.
>
> One "should" not allow this either, without a very good reason...

On most user applications, no, although
ls -l /usr/bin/ | grep '^[^ ]*s' | wc -l
gives 36 results here (many setgid rather than setuid, and not all
owned by root, but e.g. su, sudo, umount, all have to be root-owned and
suid.).

It's possible to disable set-userid file modes from being respected
using a mount option, but using that on the system partitions would
break yuor system.


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