Bug 249930 – net-wireless/wpa_supplicant - enable privilege seperation

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Description happyfool 2008-12-05 13:18:14 UTC]

The 0.6.2 changelog states:

* added support for privilege separation (run only minimal part of
  wpa_supplicant functionality as root and rest as unprivileged,
  non-root process); see 'Privilege separation' in README for details;
  this is disabled by default and can be enabled with CONFIG_PRIVSEP=y
  in .config

This is a great security feature which should mitigate the effects of many security flaws in what is a pretty large codebase. There are details at the end of README.
I believe the changes that need to be made to gentoo are relatively minor. Although I'm not sure what the effects of wpa_supplicant running as a seperate user (and apps needing to interact with it having to be a member of a group so they can write to its control socket) would be on apps like networkmanager, and what would be the best way to work this into the init system.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

[Comment 1 Wormo (RETIRED) 2008-12-06 07:03:41 UTC]

Thanks for the suggestion, let's see if anyone in the mobile team is interested in taking this on...

[Comment 2 Alon Bar-Lev 2011-10-22 18:35:44 UTC]

Anyone?

[Comment 3 charles17 2014-09-16 07:09:23 UTC]

Would that be just only one more line to the ebuild, such like following 
or would a new USE flag be needed?

 	echo "CONFIG_PRIVSEP=y" >> .config

[Comment 4 Alon Bar-Lev (RETIRED) 2014-09-16 07:36:01 UTC]

(In reply to charles17 from comment #3)
> Would that be just only one more line to the ebuild, such like following 
> or would a new USE flag be needed?
> 
>  	echo "CONFIG_PRIVSEP=y" >> .config

also, the wpa_cli within the network service should not use root.

[Comment 5 Rick Farina (Zero_Chaos) 2017-12-08 16:13:35 UTC]

adding a use flag for this called privsep in 2.6-r4.  open a new bug for anything unrelated to privsep