[Bug 1668944] Re: The _apt user ignores group membership.

[David Kalnischkies]

Nowadays our HTTPS implementation works a few layers deeper than what I
talked about three years ago, so we could similar to our auth.conf work
now open all certificate (others also?) files as root before dropping
rights. As that would be best implemented by someone who actually uses
these features in practice for easier testing: Any takers?

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Title:
  The _apt user ignores group membership.

Status in apt package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid

Bug description:
  Actually I had the same problem described in http://askubuntu.com/questions/773955/apt-get-ssl-client-certificate-not-working-on-16-04-error-while-reading-file
  I want to use client certificates with apt. But I don't want to make them world readable in order to make apt working. So I created a group 'ssl-cert' and changed the group ownership of the ssl cert files to match this group. I also added the _apt user to the ssl-cert group.

  Then I tried to open these files as user '_apt' in bash (su -s
  /bin/bash _apt) which works well.

  But if I run: "apt-get -o "Debug::Acquire::https=true" update" I still get the following error:
  * error reading ca cert file /etc/certs/mycert/ca.pem (Error while reading file.)
  * Closing connection 26

  So my guess is that apt somehow ignores the ssl-cert membership.

  Possible workarounds:
  - make ssl client cert world readable
  - change owner ssl client cert to _apt
  - change main group of _apt user from 'nogroup' to 'ssl-cert'
  - set APT::Sandbox::User "root"; in apt.conf.d

  Neither of them is pretty. 
  Maybe this is a wanted behavior, then just suggest how to fix the issue in nice way.

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