hosted reproducible package building with multiple developers?

[James Ralston]

On 2010-12-08 at 21:00+00 "Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones at redhat.com> wrote:

> To the original poster: even a VM isn't a completely robust way of
> preventing root escalations.

This is a certainly true.  If an attacker manages to gain control of a
VM guest, he can attempt to attack the VM host.  (In fact, depending
on the attack, escalated privileges on the VM guest may not even be
necessary.)

But this is simply another instance of the generic problem of security
vulnerabilities providing an avenue for privilege escalation, which
isn't a problem that is unique to VMs.

> If the developers are all in your "organization", how about using a
> cluestick-based method to prevent them doing this?

Because a security solution that trusts users not to deliberately or
accidentally acquire access that they aren't [administratively]
permitted to have is no solution.  It would be no different than
hanging a sign on the front door of my house that said, "even though
my door is unlocked, since stealing is wrong, I trust that no one will
rob me."

Furthermore, intelligent users would also refuse such an arrangement,
because if the server that provides mock is rooted, the prime suspects
would immediately be the mock users who did not otherwise have root
privileges on the box.