gksudo potentially very insecure

[Wouter Stomp]

On 7/4/05, Dennis Kaarsemaker <dennis at kaarsemaker.net> wrote:
> On ma, 2005-07-04 at 18:30 +0200, Wouter Stomp wrote:
>
> > ps. should I file a bug about this? (couldn't find one) or is there a
> > reason for doing things this way?
>
> this has already been discussed and the small timeout was chosen to be
> the trade-off between the burden of always typing a password and the
> insecurity of never having to type it. You can change/disable this
> timeout in /etc/sudoers

Do you have a link for this? Searched for it, but all I could find was
about the timeout in sudo in general, nothing specific to gksudo. I
don't think it is bad to be able to use sudo without a password at the
commandline, but in gnome there is nothing telling you you start a
program as root. The problem is not that you don't have to type a
password, but that there is no notice at all that you open a program
as root and you don't conciously do it like at the commandline. It is
like you have become a root user in gnome for the timeout period.

A solution would be to not ask for the password again in gnome when
starting the same program again, but do ask for it when starting a
different program. I don't think that will pose a burden to anyone. At
the commandline, with sudo, the current behaviour is no problem, and I
think that is what you are referring to when saying it would be a
burden to type it over and over again.

Wouter