lsb

Please standardize /var/lock/lockdev/ in the FHS

Bug #1331477 reported by Jeff Johnson
6
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
lsb
In Progress
Medium
Unassigned
Mandriva
In Progress
Medium

Bug Description

Most distributions currently set up /var/lock in different ways, and almost all
in an insecure way.

I'd like to suggest that FHS standardizes a secure setup, which is the one
Fedora appears to use in F14:

/var/lock should be root:root 755. System services may add subdirectories
beneath that dir, and only privileged processes have write access.

/var/lock/lockdev should be root:lock 775. Normal users may create LCK.. style
lock files here, and may delete them, including stale lock files from other
users.

The only place for LCK..xxx files would be /var/lock/lockdev, and not FHS.

Why this all? Well, it's the only secure way.

The reasons are explained here:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=581884
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=145264#c1

Basically, it is essential that:

- we do not create another world-writable directory where everybody can write
to

- we do not use the sticky bit, since that would disallow removal of stale lock
files owned by other users

- per-subsystem privileged lock files and directories are seperate from
LCK..xxx files, so that unprivileged users cannot remove/replace privileged
files and directories and trick privileged software to do things it shouldn't
do.

The name /var/lock/lockdev is what fedora currently uses. Other names are
thinkable too, but it's probably best to just adopt what exists already, since
the name is not totally unacceptable.

Tags: fhs
Changed in mandriva:
importance: Unknown → Medium
status: Unknown → In Progress
To post a comment you must log in.
This report contains Public information  
Everyone can see this information.

Other bug subscribers

Related blueprints

Remote bug watches

Bug watches keep track of this bug in other bug trackers.