On Mon, Nov 04, 2013 at 03:49:43AM +0000, Luke Drummond wrote:
> Hello Michael
Hi Luke,
thanks for your bugreport and your patch!
> I've tracked down the source of the problem, and think I've created an
> appropriate patch. The function RunAsSudoUserCommand() was
> dereferencing a NULL pointer when failing to check for the return
> value of getenv("SUDO_UID");
>
> I was launching Synaptic with gksu which does not set this environment
> variable, so getenv returned NULL. I do not use sudo on my system
> (though did add myself as a sudoer to confirm this behaviour and test
> my changes).
> Launching as a real root user caused the same crash.
>
> We should not launch the browsers/help viewers as root, so I've
> provided a fallback behaviour.
Indeed, thanks for finding and fixing this! Will $USER provide the
name of the real user or will it contain "root" when gksu uses it?
> The function RunAsSudoUserCommand() is currently called by the
> following three methods (none of which should run their command with
> effective root, as they are launching end-user-configurable software /
> web browsers)
>
> RGMainWindow::cbHelpAction
> RGPkgDetailsWindow::cbOpenLink
> RGPkgDetailsWindow::cbOpenHomepage
>
> The patch I've provided solves the crash problem and the security
> problem (it specifically checks whether the user is effective root,
> and returns false if it is)
>
> Comments are welcome. It's not devastatingly beautiful, but seems to
> serve its purpose.
[..]
It looks fine and I commited it locally. My only question would be if
getenv("USER"); may give us the "real" user. If not I will try to
think if there is any other way to find this out.
Thanks,
Michael
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