UsingSudo

Status

• Created: Date(2005-04-25T06:16:21Z) by JaneW

• Priority: LowPriority

• People: PaulSladenLead, OliverGrawertSecond

• Contributors: JaneW, MatthewPaulThomas

• Interested: CarlosPerelloMarin

• Status: BrainDump, BreezyGoal, DistroSpecification, DraftSpec, ColinCharlesQueue

• Branch:

• Bugs: [https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=10228 b.u.c. 10228], [https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7385#c4 b.u.c. 7385]

• Packages: passwd, gksudo, sulogin

• Depends:
• Dependents:

  FullSearch(UsingSudo)

• UduSessions: 2

Summary

Ubuntu uses sudo to ask for a password before carrying out administrative commands, unlike Windows and unlike other Linux- and Unix-based OSes. Since people migrating from those OSes have trouble understanding this, the interface design and supporting documentation needs to be clearer.

Rationale

Most legacy Unix systems have two privilege levels 'root' (everything) and 'user' (nothing) accounts. Ubuntu uses a graduated security model where all accounts are equal and can be given specific permissions to perform certain commands (eg. 'reboot') that would formally have required access to the totally-privileged 'root' user.

Generally humans feel most at home with whatever they have been shown first. Some users who have experienced other security models can feel 'shocked' or 'restricted'.

Mac OS X and Windows users moving to Ubuntu are likely to have the least shock. Single-machine Unix/Linux users are likely to have the most issues and most people try to make life 'familiar' for themselves by immediately enabling root.

The current wiki pages describing sudo could need improvement in their explanations of the usage of sudo. PaulSladen will correct this and go through the other wiki pages as well, to fix the different occurences of sudo usage to be the ubuntu desired way.

Apple (currently the largest Unix vendor in the world) has successfully tested this model and the 'sudo' suite by deploying it as the default and only method on their Mac OS X product since the initial version.

Scope and Use Cases

A user wants to gain administrative rights in his/her system, so s/he has to use sudo or gksudo.

Implementation Plan

Fixing up the wiki pages as described above for commandline sudo usage.

Fixing up gksudo with the following:

• gksudo should have a help button pointing to local documentation that explains the need/usage of sudo and gksudo.
• mention more clearly what happens, currently it says "please enter your password to run (name of the command as run on the commandline)"
• Localize the text in the gksudo window (currently its english (locale=C ?))
• Show the actual program name of the used menu entry instead of the commandline name.
• The icon used in the the dialog should look more friendly (i.e. the dialog icon could be a smiley instead of a lock).
• A indicator should show up in the notification area during the 5min timeout while i can use the gained admin rights without re entering the password, giving an option to cancel "god mode" imediately.
• The dialog should always show up, even if "god mode" is still active, to indicate that i do something requiring administrative rights. During the 5min time period where no password input is required the password in the dialog should be prefilled.

passwd or sulogin have a weird bug shown in the Data Preservation and Migration section below. Either of these has to be fixed as below:

• passwd to add a * to /etc/shadow
• or sulogin to regard an exclamation mark at the beginning of the password hash.

Data Preservation and Migration

ogra@honk:~ $ sudo head -1 /etc/shadow
root:*:12795:0:99999:7:::
ogra@honk:~ $ sudo passwd
Enter new UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully
ogra@honk:~ $ sudo head -1 /etc/shadow
root:$1$JZIMio27$32u.wqpznf1BlDxgg/ZJL0:12901:0:99999:7:::
ogra@honk:~ $ sudo passwd -l root
Kennwort geändert.
ogra@honk:~ $ sudo head -1 /etc/shadow
root:!$1$JZIMio27$32u.wqpznf1BlDxgg/ZJL0:12901:0:99999:7:::

Packages Affected

• passwd
• gksudo
• sulogin

User Interface Requirements

• several changes to gksudo
• helpfile for gksudo

Outstanding Issues

UDU BOF Agenda

UDU Pre-Work