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were you able to install this without using sudo?

In the contest you had root access for a limited amount of time, but you can also do it via a user unit.

But then you should only get the users account as shell, so while this is a neat trick, being able to gain persistent root if you are already root is not that hard.

It was part of the contest that your enemy team is not able to detect and remove your backdoor. The obscurity of systemd sockets was my winning move.

systemd doesn't bind to random ports without being told to. if the blue team didn't stop and say "why is anything listening on port %d", they're a trash blue team.

Clearly you have not used systemd and friends much.

It is an ecosystem of daemons that does a lot of things, some of which are guaranteed to surprise you. The specifics of which will vary between releases.

I could easily see some random systemd utility binding a non standard port without anyone taking notice.

That would be the distro's problem, not systemd. Any of those utilities are going to be optional, the distro has to consciously enable them and ship them in a package for it to make it to you at all. A lot of commenters seem to misunderstand that systemd is not forcing distros to do anything. All they really do is provide a set of tools for distro maintainers to choose from.

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