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RunAs

For the actual implementaton of runas, see implementation

Run0 and Systemd-run

Systemd is introducing run0 in version 256 which according to themselves would be a replacement to things like sudo and doas. One of the key advantaged, according to their own documentation, is that their implementation does not require setuid which would add more security (More about why this is not true).

Some people have gotten the wrong idea that this is a new tool, which is not the case. Systemd has a feature called systemd-run that allows you to run services, programs and more with a specified user id. The run0 is simply a symlink to systemd-run which in turn adapts a few additional functionallity when used through the symlink, like being compatible with sudo arguments like -u (More about why this is pointless).

On the surface this seams like a great idea. For one, systemd will launch processes run by systemd-run within it's own process hierarchy, meaning that you will get a clean process without reused environment variables and such while also having systemd manage and cleanup everything being run through this process. And all of this without the need for setuid (Again, not true).

SetUID

The setuid "feature" in Linux allows you to execute a program with the privileges of the program files owner. So if root owns the file then any user can execute the program as root without requiring any authorization. It's a terrible design and only requires a single bit to be set on the file. But that is how sudo works. Being owned by root it can elevate any user by executing commands for them. However sudo does implement authorization and rules that must be validated before it allows users to run anything.

Systemd's run0 should fix this issue, but sadly it does not. It's true that run0 or systemd-run itself does not rely on setuid. However it does use polkit for authorization which in turn requires setuid. The security implications of setuid is not a matter of a particular program like sudo using it, but the fact that this feature is even available to begin with. For run0 to have any meaningful affect on this, it should be able to function with setuid being disabled on the system, but that would break run0 due to it's dependency on polkit. If setuid is enabled on a system, you may as well just use sudo which in it self does not introduce much more of security risk than polkit or systemd.

Their own docs state that run0 would be able to work on systems that does not support setuid, but this is an outright lie as this issue has been pointed out to them.

Pointless compatiblity

When using systemd-run through the symlink run0, you get additional options for compatiblity with sudo. This includes arguments like -u to define a user whereas systemd-run would normally use --uid. But this is pointless seen as run0 ONLY works through this path. If you try to symlink /usr/bin/sudo to /usr/bin/run0 then those options will not be available and sudo would be executed as a regular systemd-run call expecting --uid rather than -u. If you cannot make the call to sudo backwards compatible with scripts and programs that uses it, then it's pointless to make the options backward compatible as you would have to make changes to scripts and programs anyway.

Scope

This is another issue with compatibility. Because systemd is actually a service manager, it's build to strickly deal with processes and their children. By default a systemd process, when being terminated, will have all of it's children be terminated as well. This means that if you run a root shell using run0 and then launch screen or tmux, then start a task of some sort and then lieves and exist the shell, systemd will terminate everthing, including your screen or tmux instance and the task it was dealing with. If they designed run0 as a new way of doing things, sure you would know to deal with this particular scenario and luanch a --scope process. But they are trying to mimic sudo (E.g. -u for an example) in an attempt to make it less transparent what is being used. Anyone expecting sudo behaviour will run into problems.

Authorization and Rules

In sudo you would normally use /etc/sudoers or /etc/doas.conf for doas to define rules for specific users and groups. The run0 option has no way of it's own to create rules. Instead it relies on polkit targeting org.freedesktop.systemd1.manage-units rather than something like org.freedesktop.systemd1.run0.

GUI vs TUI

Polkit will most often use your Desktop UI to prompt for password. So unlike things like sudo, unless you are authenticating via SSH or a TTY, you will get a GUI prompt rather than being prompted in the shell when invoking run0. Polkit for some reason has no simple way of changing this within a specific rule and even if they did, you would change this behavior for most of systemd, since run0 can't be targeted specifically.

Sumary

The "new" run0 is a pointless and poorly tought out attempt to fix an issue, that in the end, it does not even try to fix. Instead it just introduces more issues and complexity to a task that should be simple to use.

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An alternative to run0

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