clock riddle

[Matthias Clasen]

On Tue, 2009-02-24 at 08:18 -0600, Chris Adams wrote:
> Once upon a time, Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net> said:
> > What mechanism is there to keep track of these policies?  There should
> > be a Fedora policy to control RPMs adding new policies to PolicyKit.  As
> > a system admin, I look for setuid/setgid binaries and open sockets, but
> > now there's a new method to bypass that for root-level access.
> 
> As a follow-up, I see on F10 that a user can also increase their process
> priority level (which is normally a privilege reserved for root).  This
> is often useful in timing attacks and should not be allowed.
> 
> If I'm reading the policy right, users can change PackageKit proxy
> settings and force a refresh of metadata.  How much has PackageKit's
> (and yum's) code been audited for security?  If I can point it at a
> proxy and force it to download data, how secure is it against attack
> (e.g. via corrupted data)?
> 

Can we please try to stay realistic here. 
We are talking about default settings for a desktop system, where users
are expected to be able to update their systems.