New version of mock working (I think)

[Clark Williams]

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All,

The inside-out version of mock (or upside-down, depending on your
perspective) seems to be working. For those that don't know what I'm
talking about, we've been looking at changing the way mock deals with
uid/gid manipulation to improve security a bit. The old way was for
/usr/bin/mock to be a link to mock.py and whenever mock wanted to do
something that required root privilege, it called a setuid root
program called /usr/sbin/mock-helper. This program knew how to do a
select few commands (chroot, mount, etc.) and did some argument
validation. Unfortunately mock-helper has some security issues and
extending it would require us to write more C code. While most of us
aren't afraid of writing C code, writing *secure* C code is not simple
and in this case it's probably not worth the effort.

Someone (Michael?) suggested that we turn everything around and write
a simple setuid root/setgid mock launcher program that would then
start mock.py and allow it to manipulate privilege from python code.
I wrote the first cut at a launcher and then added code to mock.py to
elevate and drop privileges around commands that needed it. I now have
a set of code that will build simple SRPMS (elinks, rsync, tar, etc.)
and would like to get some other eyeballs on this code. The "new"
organization is we have a /usr/bin/mock that is a setuid C program
which only knows how to exec /usr/bin/mock.py.

While none of the changes are massive, they are spread across a few
files (Makefile, mock.py, mock.spec, etc/default.cfg, src/Makefile,
src/mock.c) so I'm wondering if I should just blast out the files to
the list, or if I should cut a branch in CVS and let people look at it
from there? Or, should I just check it in and if the consensus is that
it sucks, we can change or revert?

Thoughts?

Clark

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