I talked yesterday on how RedHat made a change to Fedora 12 to allow normal users to install any piece of (signed) software from the Fedora repositories without a root password. Slashdot reports that RedHat reversed the policy after an onslaught of community criticism. Owen Taylor (longtime employee of RedHat) made what seems to me to be quite a balanced statement of the situation.
Basically, he said that, instead of asking for the root password every time the user wants to do something out of the ordinary, it’s better to define what users can do what, and let them do it. Teaching users to enter their root password all the time just sets them up to give the root password to a possibly malicious program.
This had been discussed as part of an overall framework for PolicyKit (a granular permissions system for Linux), along with a GUI for setting what users and groups can do what. What happened in Fedore 12 was the the maintainer (Richard Hughes) went ahead and made the policy change allowing for user software installation without the GUI being ready.
So now RedHat has decided to make the user enter the root password when installing software in this release. In future releases, the other PolicyKit elements will be present, thereby allowing some changes in the software installation policy.
This is actually a balanced approach, and I think this’ll actually be better for both security and user experience in future Fedora (and other Linux) distributions.
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