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?
but no one seems to be discussing how risky it actually is.
That is because people stopped doing it ages ago.
But shouldn’t Firefox be sandboxing every website and not allowing anything to access the base system?
Security is always a matter of layers. Any given layer can fail some of the time but you want to set up your security so situations where all the layers fail together are rare.
Usig anything as root is a security risk.
Using any UI application as root is a bigger risk. That’s because every UI toolkit loads plugins and what not from all over the place and runs the code from those plugins (e.g. plugins installed system wide and into random places some environment variables point to). Binary plugins get executed in the context of the application running and can do change every aspect of your program. I wrote a small image plugin to debug an issue once that looked at all widgets in the UI and wrote all the contents of all text fields (even those obfuscated to show only dots in the UI) to disk whenever some image was loads. Plugins in JS or other non-native code are more limited, but UI toolkits tend to have binary plugins.
So if somebody manages to set the some env vars and gets root to run some UI application with those set (e.g. using sudo), then that attacker hit the jackpot. In fact some toolkits will not even bring up any UI when run as root to avoid this.
Running any networked UI application as root is the biggest risk. Those process untrusted data by definition with who knows what set of plugins loaded.
Ideally you run the UI as a normal user and then use sudo to run individual commands as root.
So is the main worry with GUIs that they have potential code execution vulnerabilities? Or is the worry that the plugins themselves are malicious?
Plugins are a code execution vulnerability by design;-) Especially with binary plugins you can call/access/inspect everything the program itself can. All UI toolkits make heavy use of plugins, so you can not avoid those with almost all UI applications.
There are non-UI applications with similar problems though.
Running anything with network access as root is an extra risk that effects UI and non-UI applications in the same way.
Just don’t do that 😁
I don’t get it anyway, if you login remotely, why don’t you just open firefox locally but on the remote servers? This makes not much sense.
But If you absolutely have to. … At least be careful with your surf-targets. A search-engine and wiki would most likely be fine. Some pron-, stream- or warez-sites? Nah. Surely not.
Without any judgement: why are your servers running X11? Just because you dislike SSH’ing to them?
Mainly that. I want to be able to have multiple terminal windows open and have them stay open independent of my main PC. Part of the reason I have a file server instead of plugging all the drives into my PC is so I can offload processor heavy operations onto it (namely making archives and compressing files for long term storage) so I don’t have to use my PC for that.
People have mentioned programs like screen but IMO it’s way more annoying to juggle multiple terminals with it than if they were just windows, and also screen doesn’t scroll so whatever goes beyond the top edge is just inaccessible which I find really annoying. I’ve also been screwed by mistyped file operations on the terminal before (deleting stuff I didn’t mean to mainly) and I just find it safer to use a GUI file manager where it’s a lot harder to subtly mess something up and not notice until it’s too late.
screen doesn’t scroll
Screen (and any other muxer) can scroll just fine. You just have to learn how to do it in each one. Tmux, for example, is ctrl+b [ to enter scroll mode.
mistyped file operations
Get a good TUI file manager. I use and recommend ranger.
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)
I’m not going to judge you (too much), it’s your system, but that’s unnecessarily risky setup. You should never need to logon to root desktop like that, even for convenience reasons.
I hope this is done over VPN and that you have 2FA configured on the VPN endpoint? Please don’t tell me it’s just portforward directly to a VNC running on the servers or something similar because then you have bigger problems than just random ‘oops’.
I do also remember using the browser in my main server to figure out how to set up the PiHole
To be honest, you’re most probably OK - malicious ad campaigns are normally not running 24/7 globally. Chances of you randomly tumbling into a malicious drive-by exploit are quite small (normally they redirect you to install fake addons/updates etc), but of course its hard to tell because you don’t remember what sites you visited. Since most of this has gone through PiHole filters, I’d say there’s even smaller chance to get insta-pwned.
But have a look at browser history on the affected root accounts, the sites along with timestamps should be there. You can also examine your system logs and correlate events to your browser history, look for weird login events or anything that doesn’t look like “normal usage”. You can set up some network monitoring stuff (like SecurityOnion) on your routers SPAN, if you’re really paranoid and try to see if there’s any anomalous connections when you’re not using the system. You could also consider setting up ClamAV and doing a scan.
You’re probably OK and that’s just paranoia.
But… having mentioned paranoia… now you’ll always have that nagging lack of trust in your system that won’t go away. I can’t speak to how you deal with that, because it’s all about your own risk appetite and threat model.
Since these are home systems the potential monetary damage from downtime and re-install isn’t huge, so personally I’d just take the hit and wipe/reinstall. I’d learn from my mistakes and build it all up again with better routines and hygiene. But that’s what I’d do. You might choose to do something else and that might be OK too.
I hope this is done over VPN and that you have 2FA configured on the VPN endpoint? Please don’t tell me it’s just portforward directly to a VNC running on the servers or something similar because then you have bigger problems than just random ‘oops’.
I have never accessed any of my servers from the internet and haven’t even adjusted my router firewall settings to allow this. I kept wanting to but never got around to it.
Since these are home systems the potential monetary damage from downtime and re-install isn’t huge, so personally I’d just take the hit and wipe/reinstall. I’d learn from my mistakes and build it all up again with better routines and hygiene. But that’s what I’d do.
Yeah this and other comments have convinced me to reinstall and start from scratch. Will be super annoying to set everything back up but I am indeed paranoid.
I have never accessed any of my servers from the internet and haven’t even adjusted my router firewall settings to allow this. I kept wanting to but never got around to it.
Does that mean you realistically don’t even know your network (router) setup? Because it’s entirely possible your machine is completely open to the internet - say, thanks to IPv6 autoconfiguration - and you wouldn’t even know about it.
It’s pretty unlikely but could potentially happen with some ISPs. Please always set up a firewall, especially for a server type machine. It’s really simple to block incoming outside traffic.
Huh. I never even thought of that. I use my ISP’s router in bridge mode and have my own router running on mostly default settings, IIRC the only thing I explicitly changed was to have it forward DNS requests to my Pihole. I should inspect the settings more closely or as you said just configure the server to block the relevant ports from outside the LAN. Thank you.
