Why is that?
other dev: this is insecure
me: what's your threat model?
other dev: <convoluted, opportunistic-only highly-timing-sensitive scenario that assumes attacker has gained internal network access>
me: you do realize all our boxes have an "admin:password"-esque standard login available and passwordless sudo. if they're on our network they can already just do basically anything.
People (well, devs) love to think about security in very fine-grained detail, and honestly that's good. We should all be thinking about this. But your security is only as good as your weakest link, and when your security policy already literally codifies "we will trust the firewall to make intranet security less annoying/complicated" then unless you want to go change that or your threat model is describing an attack on that security model, then please don't try to get overly clever.
Now - that said - I do wish more orgs just did defense-in-depth from the beginning. It's so easy to provision certs nowadays that there's almost no reason not to do mTLS etc even in something like a homelab setting.
e.g.
> wireshark -k -i <(ssh -l root remote-host "dumpcap -P -w - -f 'not tcp port 22'")
Have your prod boxes set up with proper permissions for sure but there's hardly a practical risk doing this in dev/testing.
Run nothing as root, unless absolutely required. And this had nothing to do with C or rust, running rust based software, any software as root, when not required,is unnecessary, and risky as well.
Nothing is safe. Behave that way, or you do your oeg, and yourself, wrong. And its not OK to treat a dev env as fine to get compromised.
Many orgs get borked by someone taking over dev machines, or infra, and sliding in that way.
Good advice, to be sure. Especially anything getting network input[1].
In a reddit thread once, I pointed out that there is no need for any server/service program to have any access to the file holding the startup configuration. There really isn't.
If the user needs to write that configuration, use a different program with elevated privileges that do nothing but write that file.
When the server starts up and needs to read config, it should start up as a user with elevated privileges, read the entire file in the first 3 lines of `main()`, then drop privileges and continue execution as normal. It will never be able to access that file during the rest of its execution.
I don't think I've ever had a comment downvoted on reddit so hard!
[1] No need to say "untrusted network input" - all input is untrusted unless you are literally in control of both parties.
It would add fair bit of code, sure, but nicely isolated and not complex: It's three extra lines of code in the main function, and a separate utility to write the config.
Balance that against the fact that the server then never writes its own config - that code is moved into the configuration-writing application, which removes complexity from the server application.
> and in particular couple the application to a specific combination of operating system/privileges model/file system.
It does indeed couple it to those systems that are sufficiently POSIX-like; however if you are writing a server that doesn't run on a Linux or BSD-derived system, you are out in the left field anyway.
> How great is the benefit, really? How many things are exploited by the application writing to its own startup config?
Well, the comment I made was in a thread discussing a vulnerability in the Microsoft Teams application[1] which was exploitable to retrieve the user's secrets[2] from their config file.
So, that particular comment was very much on-topic and in-context.
[1] Not sure if it was on all platforms or not.
[2] Or something - I forget exactly what was leaked.
How much is probably going to depends on how everything is configured, what your threat model is, what service it is, and a million other things.
If a malicious actor compromises your normal user account, they can also compromise your configuration files and alias sudo or set up a keylogger or do all kinds of nasty stuff.
Going from standard user to root isn't much of a challenge for all but the most minimal infections in almost every standard setup for common Linux distributions.
Malicious hackers don't need anything other than your current user permissions anyway; your API/ssh keys/crypto wallets are all stored in your home directory or other places a malicious program can get access to.
There are exceptions, but I very much doubt that most people develop on QubesOS levels of Linux security.
There is no practical antivirus software on Linux that will catch anyone sophisticated enough to exploit tcpdump. You need a LOT of know-how to run a "safe" Linux system that you're more likely to learn as a sysadmin than as a developer. Security is hard, especially on the Linux desktop, and it will be as long as attempts to add it are met with responses like "they're trying to take our freedom away".
Common internet resources aren't much better ("just disable selinux") and current solutions for usability problems in this space (i.e. sandboxed applications not being able to access the directories you chose because they don't correspond to what the dev expected) aren't very great either.
I definitely think we should use the resources for secure desktop computing that we do have, which includes running tshark and friends at the lowest level of privilege possible, but I can definitely understand why people ask "why should I bother" when most of their setup runs at Windows XP levels of security out of the box.
I mean, are you really running tcpdump on your local computer? I imagine you would be running it on the server you are trying to debug. So the security setup would plausibly be a bit different than that.
But generally i agree. Good practise not to run things as root, especially this type of tooling, but its not exactly putting your private key into a public git repo level of insecurity by any means.
I did several times when I needed to debug or record some traffic because I couldn't figure out why some application wasn't communicating right. Wireshark quickly got overwhelmed with packets so I used tcpdump instead.
I'm most likely running tcpdump on (near) production servers because it's often a tool of last result, but sometimes it's just the right tool for the job (or just as good a tool as the fancier ones, and why not stick to the universal solution?).
Sure, the attack surface of tcpdump is much smaller than wireshark, so the issue is not as pronounced, but wireshark indeed had a lot of vulnerabilities in the past: https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-4861...
It has tons of dissectors which aren't nearly as battle tested as my network stack.
I'm also going to add that I have passwordless sudo, so there's no meaningful difference in my case.
Assuming you care about infosec from your profile, privilege escalation is definitely something you want to avoid especially if you're using these tools in for example a CTF engagement where the first thing I'll be doing is enumerating my adversaries