I wanted to open a discussion for F12 about running services on shell accounts.

[Daniel J Walsh]

On 05/01/2009 05:34 PM, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Fri, May 01, 2009 at 10:31:12 -0400,
>    Daniel J Walsh<dwalsh at redhat.com>  wrote:
>> I would like to run restorecond as a user service rather then as system
>> service.  I want to run it under the Users UID and under with the users
>> context.
>>
>> Then I can have it watch for creation of files in the users home
>> directory and be the equivalent of running restorecon ~/ by the user.
>
> This seems to increase the risk of hostile apps being able to get executables
> relabelled to something they couldn't do directly. If the app has the ability
> to write the directory it can replace a file labelled with a label it couldn't
> couldn't assign directly with another file and then wait for restorecond to
> change the label.
>
> While the same thing would happen with a relabel or running restorecon
> manually, currently there is a lot more opportunity to discover the problem
> before the file is relabelled.
>
The suggesting here is to use dbus to start applications in terminal 
shell as the same user UID, not to have the system dbus start the app. 
So I fail to see how this affects auditing.  The goal here is to run 
restorecond as my UID. Not Root.    Adding some module to pam does not 
help the multiple restorecond programs running, problem.  And I still 
have the problem of cleaning up in the pam stack on exit.

My thinking is we use dbus for setting up a session and it needs to be 
in charge of cleaning up the session when all of the same UID's leave.

Otherwise every app that wants this functionality needs to do it.

The current restorecond as Bruno points out is a potential security 
problem in a user can create a file and the restorecond can relabel it, 
potentially to a label the user is not allowed to relabel to.

I know Nalin has looked into the potential for this as a better way of 
doing kerberos ticket handling and ssh-agent.  So there are other 
potential users then restorecond.