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- Hacker News
- >the one led by the racist, so it isn't getting a mention here
Are people really terminally online enough to understand this?
by venussnatch - I don't know what he's referring to but I stopped reading at that sentence.by SoftTalker
- I'm pretty sure he's talking about Omarchy. They had some container related issue not too long ago.
OpenMandriva would be my next guess, but it's not a newer distro.
by nosioptar - Why would an adversary being able to execute code as root on a personal computer be a bigger threat than their being able to execute code as non-root? Surely just about any of the stuff that a malicious hacker might want to do to someone's personal computer can be done without root... right?by orangea
- Code executed by user can do what user can do. What is the point you are trying to make?
Yes, of course there are still users out there that execute all software under the same account.
Inability to use the tools at hand to protect your data is not a technical issue.
by BodyCulture - I run all agents as a different user for this reason.
- No.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing#Security
Read up on basic user based security. Multiple users can exist on a system, each with its own resources, root/admin can effectively affect any user, so breaking the user-root barrier could allow a user to affect other users.
Originally users meant actual people, but in modern systems users can belong to subsystem, so for example an HTTP server with a website may have its own user, but a mail system could have another, so a breach in the website system would be confined to said user. Going from user to root is called a Local Privilege Escalation and would allow a breach from the website to metastasize into the mail system.
by TZubiri - With a user shell, I can grab their browser data, personal documents, and try to set up persistent background daemons that listen on programs and do keylogging/screenshotting (harder on Wayland than it was on X11).
With root, I can read all program memory, try to extract decryption keys for encrypted filesystems, modify the kernel, punch open backdoors, modify any arbitrary program, read all user files, etc.
A notable extra issue is the rise of AI agents, which often eagerly test the boundaries of every sandbox they are placed within. I would not run an AI agent as root, nor would I give it full access to a rootful container runtime.
- There are substantial differences.
For one, as non-root user you are tied to the permissions system and can't access most of the data. If one of your services (let's say sql) get hacked, they are tied to sql user, and unless the achieve privilege escalation, they can't mangle with other services data (eg webserver).
Also network wide, a non-root user can't use different protocol than tcp and udp. The only reason you can ping as a regular user is because of the setuid on the ping program, otherwise icmp is not allowed to non-root users.
There are of course other reasons, but these are some examples on how it would be different.
- In my opinion the biggest advantage of podman is that it uses pods with basically the same config and behavior as kubernetes does. As long as you just use podman pods instead (or possibly via) compose files you likely just notice that only the pod has one (and not any more) veth interface, that you reach other containers inside a pod via localhost:$port (instead of $service-name:$port) but when you switch later on to kubernetes you are already familiar with some basics.by ma2kx