[Bug 1882098] Re: Packagekit lets user install untrusted local packages in Bionic and Focal

[Esko Järnfors]

Thanks for triaging and investigating this, Julian!

A fix for at least the aptcc backend would be highly appreciated -- I'd
hope the other backends will fix this on their own if they care about
it.

The point of packagekit+policykit is to enable people to do (at least
somewhat limited) stuff without explicit root access -- otherwise you'd
just give them sudo rights and be done with it. In the current
situation, granting a user the right to install ("trusted") packages
actually grants them rights to place arbitrary files in the filesystem
and execute arbitrary code (package scripts) as root, which is at the
very very least highly misleading.

I took a cursory look at the earlier apt backend written in python
(which is now deleted from the packagekit tree) and it at least looked
like it had some logic to decide whether a package can be trusted or not
so it didn't seem like checking where the package is coming from would
be unprecedented.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1882098

Title:
  Packagekit lets user install untrusted local packages in Bionic and
  Focal

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