RFC: Remove write permissions from executables

[Richard Zidlicky]

On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 04:10:39PM +0100, Benny Amorsen wrote:
> 
> > Mounting the fs read only is much easier and safer - and has long tradition.
> 
> This is not feasible as a distribution policy. You can't guarantee that
> /usr/bin is on its own partition so you can mount it read only. 

of course it is not guaranteed. But it is not difficult to detect and I think 
plenty of sysadmins are doing it that way. Used to have many more advantages
than just a marginal gain in security.

Fedora certainly can not mandate this as a policy it would be nice if it would 
work with this common setup.

> Also, the advantage of the proposed change was that it would not affect
> e.g. yum upgrade. Creative use of mount --bind could perhaps achieve the
> same result, but not in a way which I consider sane.

that would be indeed insane. But as has been mentioned rpm could have a hook
to do some actions before and after modifying anything.

> All in all I think it's a shame that the original proposal didn't work
> out at this time. Having binaries owned by bin:bin does have Unix (but
> not Linux AFAIK) tradition behind it.

now that you mention bin:bin, I remember the old days.

Richard