Bug 125932

Summary:	Accesses /root/.themes and maybe other things under /root
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Russell Coker <russell>
Component:	rhgb	Assignee:	Ray Strode [halfline] <rstrode>
Status:	CLOSED INSUFFICIENT_DATA	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	2	CC:	k.georgiou, mattdm
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i686
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2006-10-25 20:04:35 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:
Bug Depends On:
Bug Blocks:	133471

Description Russell Coker 2004-06-14 10:59:24 UTC

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.2; Linux) (KHTML, like Gecko)

Description of problem:
RHGB and other system processes should not use /root for their configuration files.  This is particularly important for graphical programs as changes for a root user X login should not affect the system boot process.

For good system management you want to track changes to all files that are used as part of the boot process to avoid unwelcome surprises when rebooting a server after a long period of uptime.  When system programs such as RHGB access configuration files under /root this may cause problems, with a potential result of making the system unbootable.

Here are URLs for a couple of threads of discussion referencing this:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-selinux-list/2004-June/msg00126.html
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-selinux-list/2004-June/msg00155.html

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):


How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Boot a SE Linux machine with RHGB and the "strict" policy and observe the AVC messages.

Additional info:

Comment 1 Daniel Veillard 2004-09-13 15:33:53 UTC

Hum, looking at it a bit, it's hard. This would require running rhgb
under a different account than root, and this is a significant change,

Daniel

Comment 2 Russell Coker 2004-09-13 15:45:20 UTC

I think that the best option is to modify the programs in question 
to determine a configuration directory by a method other than 
calling getpwuid(getuid()). 
 
One possibility is using $HOME which could trivially be set to 
another value.  Another possibility is to have an environment 
variable to specify the location ($GNOME_CONFIG maybe?), this could 
be useful for many things other than solving this problem. 
 
I agree that running rhgb as non-root is not the correct solution.

Comment 3 Daniel Veillard 2004-09-13 15:56:04 UTC

it's not possible, the lookup is done in gtk libraries
it would require a specific extension to gtk+ . It does not
use $HOME , but getpwent() . 
Relying on a gtk+ enhancement is one way, I would first look
at running it as nobody instead, using setreuid() once X
has been started, this will be a pain because we will need to umount
the filesystem too, I'm not sure it will really work with gtk+ anyway.

Daniel

Comment 4 Daniel Veillard 2004-09-13 15:58:26 UTC

Seen your depend on bug, this is unlikely to get fixed on time for FC3
honnestly. Especially if there is a gtk+ change involved !

Daniel

Comment 5 Matthew Miller 2005-04-26 15:46:48 UTC

Fedora Core 2 is now maintained by the Fedora Legacy project for
security updates only. If this problem is a security issue, please
reopen and reassign to the Fedora Legacy product. If it is not a
security issue and hasn't been resolved in the current FC3 updates or
in the FC4 test release, reopen and change the version to match.

Comment 6 John Thacker 2006-10-25 20:04:35 UTC

Closed per above message and lack of response.  Note that FC2 is not even
supported by Fedora Legacy currently.