I noticed Debian does this by default and Arch wiki recommends is citing improved security and upstream.
I don’t get why that’s more secure. Is this assuming torrents might be infected and aims to limit what a virus may access to the dedicated user’s home directory (/var/lib/transmission-daemon on Debian)?
Isn’t that a risk for anything downloaded, assuming I run transmission as my user, not root?
@Quail4789 @mik Anything that you execute, yes.
Is your user in the sudo group? The user transmission should not be
My user is, yes. But there has to be an exploit in sudo for the program to elevate itself using it without the user knowing, no? It’s possible for sure but I’m seeing this type of a precaution on a torrent client for the first time.
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@BaumGeist @Quail4789 If you get software from an untrusted source, and it does not matter if it’s a torrent, ftp, https, scp, etc, you run this risk. And usually when you download with a torrent the supplying site will publish a hash which you can compare to make sure that it wasn’t corrupted in transit.
@Quail4789 @rc__buggy@sh.it just.works there is not a known exploit in sudo but there IS a known exploit in the library it uses to elevate privileges, at least in older versions. Also I make full system weekly backups so worst comes to worst I’m never going to lose more than a weeks data.
Then run it as your user. It’s not best practice but you do you
edit: lol
@rc__buggy @Quail4789 And that is a very good point but the only thing I ever use transmission for is downloading distros. If my distro is already compromised then it’s already all over, transmission aside.
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It may be mostly “security theater” but it requires almost no extra effort and drastically increases the difficulty of compromise by adding privilege escalation as another requirement to gaining root access.
Has there ever been such an exploit? Given all other torrent clients I’ve seen just run as your user by default, is there something different in transmission over others that make it more vulnerable?
The point is also to minimize potential damages caused by a bug in the software. Just this year there have been multiple data-destroying bugs in publicly released software. If the app runs as a server it’s usually trivial to have it run as a dedicated user, with just enough permissions to do its job.
It’s just good practice, even though the risks might be low why risk it at all?
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Not yet, but if every system was only protected against what already happened instead of also what could happen, we’d get hacked a lot more often!