Re: [PATCH] sysctl: permission check based on capability not euid

[Chris Wright]

* Stephen Hemminger (stephen.hemminger@xxxxxxxxxx) wrote:
> This patch modifies the permission checks for sysctl's from being based on uid=0 (root)
> to use the capability system. This matches the behavior of other OS's using sysctl's
> and capabilities. Linux has tried to get away from using uid=0 for security overrides
> and use capabilities instead. 
> 
> I was working on Quagga enhancement that involved enabling a sysctl, and it didn't
> work because is a safe daemon and drops privileges and resets its real/effective uid
> after initialization; it then re-enables only the capabilities when it needs to
> do some privileged operation. This wouldn't work because sysctl's were still using
> the root based permission check. The existing code in quagga to enable ip forwarding
> doesn't work for the same reason.

I don't think CAP_SYS_ADMIN makes sense for net.*, for example.
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