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> While good luck doing that on a laptop that is only ever used to establish an SSH session.

[...]

> Set that up about ten months ago now (don't remember exactly). It's working flawlessly. Not a single issue.

So now your laptop hasn't had security updates for 10 months? Things like this are part of the reason I did the research in https://dgl.cx/2023/09/ansi-terminal-security.

It also funny that you've reinvented basically a serial console, but in a modern way, with a second factor. (You could actually just use a physical terminal with S/Key or something.)

> P.S: it's just a proof of concept... But I think that requiring to tap a Yubikey every single time you want to do something as root is something that should be envisaged/discussed more and it was great to read TFA doing it too.

Agreed, https://neilzone.co.uk/2022/11/using-a-yubikey-or-other-secu... is another potential option for this.

> So now your laptop hasn't had security updates for 10 months? Things like this are part of the reason I did the research in https://dgl.cx/2023/09/ansi-terminal-security.

That is very interesting: I'll study that.

You're correct: it's a Debian 12.2 install (seriously hardened). I take it the surface attack is small. I'm literally using only SSH from that machine: it's got a firewall too. It's only allowing new SSH out session to the desktop. Every other traffic is rejected.

So what can realistically affect that machine? SSH exploits for sure...

So for example for the recent SSH "terraspin" exploit, I did implement the workaround (by removing broken Ciphers and MACs from the list of authorized ones).

I don't know about the rest: I mainly SSH as root into the desktop when I need to install a new package and that's about it.

I'm not losing too much sleep over that machine that is on a private LAN and which is not directly connected to the Internet (I'm running both 192.168.x.x and 10.x.x.x at home).

I'm not saying it's a panacea: it was mostly a proof of concept and as it's working fine for my usecase, I kept using it.

> So I do I gain root access?

And how do you do user A can only run commands X, Y, and Z, and edit files in /etc/someapp/?

Isn't this getting you to https://xkcd.com/1200/ ? Like, yeah you've protected root access - and it's a neat and probably effective solution - but if an attacker is in a position to rewrite package manager commands then I have to assume that it's already game over for anything important on your laptop

Well first I never understood this mentality: "If my main account is compromised, then I lost anything anyway".

For those who believe that's true, why not run everything as root? I mean, seriously: why not just run the browser as root?

If you're using a personal machine, there is very little you're gaining by not running a browser as root.

The security gain is significant on multi-user systems where you don't have sudo/doas privileges at all - even if a user is compromised, the system administrator should not have to worry about it.

Why is it not true? What attack are you protecting against?

> why not just run the browser as root?

Practically, last time I tried Chromium wouldn't let me. But Firefox did, at least.

The better answer is that they can use some level of internal sandboxing so that an exploit affecting one part of the browser doesn't make it out of the browser, and AIUI if every part runs as root it's easier to escape that layer of security.

Because that makes it super easy to accidentally clobber stuff. IME, sudo has been more of a guardrail against my idiocy and fat-fingers than it has against malware/other users.