I have a few Linux servers at home that I regularly remote into in order to manage, usually logged into KDE Plasma as root. Usually they just have several command line windows and a file manager open (I personally just find it more convenient to use the command line from a remote desktop instead of directly SSH-ing into the system), but if I have an issue, I’ve just been absentmindedly searching stuff up and trying to find solutions using the preinstalled Firefox instance from within the remote desktop itself, which would also be running as root.
I never even thought to install uBlock Origin on it or anything, but the servers are all configured to use a PiHole instance which blocks the vast majority of ads. However, I do also remember using the browser in my main server to figure out how to set up the PiHole instance in the first place, and that server also happens to be the most important one and is my main NAS.
I never went on any particularly shady websites, but I also don’t remember exactly which websites I’ve been on as root, though I do seem to remember seeing ads during the initial pihole setup, because it didn’t go very smoothly and I was searching up error messages trying to get it to work.
This is definitely on me, but it never crossed my mind until recently that it might be a bad idea to use a browser as root, and searching online everyone just states the general cybersecurity doctrine to never do it (which I’m now realizing I shouldn’t have) but no one seems to be discussing how risky it actually is. Shouldn’t Firefox be sandboxing every website and not allowing anything to access the base system? Between “just stop doing it” and “you have to reinstall the OS right now there’s probably already a virus on there,” how much danger do you suppose I’m in? I’m mainly worried about the security/privacy of my personal data I have stored on the servers. All my servers run Fedora KDE Spin and have Intel processors if that makes a difference?
It should be ok because nothing will run on your system without a permission prompt at least. So they that should ring some bells of system is asking for your password when you didn’t try to install anything.
But best practice would be log in as a regular user and use sudo to do any admin tasks.
Damn, you are so lucky that the downvotes are disabled or you would be downvoted to Oblivion.
Honestly friend I don’t give a rats ass about up or down votes. I’m just here to read, learn and converse. Some things I’ll get right, some I’ll get wrong. That’s life.
I could stop using this tomorrow and it would make zero difference to my life, know what I mean? It’s just some site. My real life is something altogether different.
A process running as root does not need a prompt or any user interaction to do whatever the hell it wants on most (nearing ALL, but I’d be wary of absolutes with Linux) systems. I’m unaware of any means that a Desktop Environment could restrict a process running with root permissions by requiring an interactive prompt of some sort for anything. If your DE is running as root, all of its children are also running as root (unless you’ve rigged things up to run explicitly as other users) which means just about anything you are doing could be running rampant malicious actors on your system and nothing would seem amiss until it made itself evident.
Now, it does seem unlikely that anyone has written any malicious code that would run in a browser expecting to be root on a Linux system, so that’s likely the saving grace here, but that’s only security through obscurity and that’s not much to hang your hopes on for any system you care about.
You mean if he has some malicious script that wants to install something or run something it’s not going to adjust ask him “do you want to install x?”
You should learn how to use ssh. Running Firefox on top of Xorg is a disaster waiting to happen.
Realistically it’s not super dangerous, and no you probably don’t have a virus just from browsing a few tech support sites, but you do eliminate your last line of defense when you run software as root. As you know, root can read/change/delete anything on your system whereas regular users are generally restricted to their own data. So if there is a security problem in the software, it’s made worse by the fact that you were running it as root.
You are right though that Firefox does still have its own protections - it’s probably one of the most hardened pieces of software on your computer exactly because it connects to the whole wide internet - and those protections are not negated by running as root. However if those protections fail, the attacker has the keys to the kingdom rather than just a sizable chunk of the kingdom.
To put that in perspective though, if there is a Firefox exploit and a hacker gets access to your regular user account, that’s already pretty bad in itself. Even if you run as a regular unprivileged user they would still have have access to things like: your personal documents, your ssh keys, your Firefox profile with your browsing history, your session cookies and your saved passwords, your e-mail, your paypal account, your banking information, …
As root, they could obviously do even more like damage like reading all users’ data, installing a keylogger or screengrabber, installing a rootkit to make themselves undetectable, but for most regular users most of the damage is already done when their own account is compromised.
So when these discussions come up, I always have to think about this XKCD comic:
They might have access to all that data once but a lot of the paths towards making that a persistent threat that doesn’t go away after the next reboot and most of the ones towards installing something even deeper in the system that might even survive a reinstall do require root.
On a typical home user desktop linux setup, there’s virtually no difference between your regular user and root.
Access to your data, emails, passwords, installing software (in /home), access to LAN and so on are already possible without root permissions, so there really is not a whole lot that an attacker cannot do even without root.
And then, if you use sudo or su (or whatever) to switch to root with a password, escalating to root privileges is basically trivial for an attacker. An attacker can divert your PATH to compromised binaries. They could just replace “sudo” with their own little script that steals your password.
My goodness
