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In reply to Systemd is not Magic Security Dust

Reader JCC1 on 2016-10-03 at 18:37:

Glad to see you mention qmail, and his response to your comment was fairly hilarious. Privilege separation via exec chaining (aka Berstein Chaining) is a key concept that the systemd developers don't get. If they DID get it, they'd understand that that's precisely why you don't run all of this in the same process. Small, simple utilities that do what they need to do, drop privileges, and execute something else.

Supervise > tcpserver > drop privs > app authentication > remainder of the app. This is the antithesis of the systemd model. If they truly understood it, they'd understand the importance of a tiny PID 1, which serves as the basis for everything else: small, secure tools which do precisely and only what they need to do, remove their privileges, and chain to the next step.

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