Package: angband Version: 1:4.2.5+dfsg1-3 Severity: wishlist User: [email protected] Usertags: setgid
The /usr/games/angband executable is setgid games. Because this game depends on libraries that make no attempt to avoid privilege escalation from the caller to the games group, this use of setgid is basically security theatre: it's essentially equivalent to making the high scores world-writeable. In particular, because this game depends on SDL, it's very easy to use it to escalate privileges to the games group. SDL is not designed to be used by set*id executables (reference: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/issues/14717). Discussion on the debian-devel-games list starting at https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-games/2025/12/msg00016.html (or equivalently https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/[email protected]) indicates that several games team members think the complexity cost and security implications of games being setgid are too high a price to pay for shared savegames and game state on multi-user systems. Could this game be modified to save game state to a per-user location instead? In SDL 2 or later, the SDL_PrefPath() is likely to be the most suitable place. To avoid data loss, it will probably be necessary to copy game state from /var/games/angband into the new location for a transitional period. If a transition path is added during the Debian 13 'forky' cycle, then perhaps it could be removed when testing reopens after the Debian 14 'duke' release. Thanks, smcv
