| 10 Jun 2021 |
|  Ekleog joined the room. | 16:25:29 |
 hexa | yeah, I guess our capability of delivering security fixes through staging is fckd because of a lack of darwin builders | 20:15:21 |
| hexa | * yeah, I guess our ability of delivering security fixes through staging is fckd because of a lack of darwin builders | 20:16:15 |
 Sandro | Demote Darwin to level 2? | 21:26:08 |
 Alyssa Ross | x86_64-darwin is tier 2 already | 21:27:09 |
| 11 Jun 2021 |
| hexa | https://github.blog/2021-06-10-privilege-escalation-polkit-root-on-linux-with-bug/ | 00:00:29 |
|  mkg20001 joined the room. | 05:46:14 |
 andi- | Thankfully nobody has mutable users, right? | 08:10:29 |
 Linux Hackerman | Pretty sure there are many other ways to get root via polkit :) | 08:24:22 |
 Henson | because the fix for the polkit bug (https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/125554) is in the form of a patch without any change to the package version string, is there any way for someone to tell whether a particular system has this fix or not? | 11:30:54 |
 pennae | you could check the package version and the store hash that provides the running polkit | 11:32:44 |
| Henson | but the package version will just be 0.118 both with and without the fix, right? | 11:34:11 |
 Synthetica | we should really have a canonical way of denoting security patches | 11:35:24 |
| pennae | Henson: yeah, but the store hash will be different (and only one of them will be vulnerable) | 11:35:46 |
| pennae | would be better to have a marker though | 11:35:58 |
| Henson | pennae: yes, to tell from the store hash you'd have to download a known fixed version and compare the hash. And if they're different, that doesn't necessarily mean the other one is vulnerable, as the store hash could change based on some other non-patch-related build dependency of polkit | 11:37:20 |
| pennae | true, that way you can only really identify something that is for-sure broken | 11:39:00 |
| Sandro | I have a better idea:
cat /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/$USER/channels/nixos/.version-suffix | cut -d. -f2 and then check if that short hash includes the commit you need
| 11:40:28 |
| Sandro | pretty easy and uses existing stuff we already have | 11:40:47 |
| Synthetica | Not everything uses channels in that way | 11:41:16 |
| Sandro | then you are fetching some package with a git hash | 11:41:28 |
| Sandro | does not work when you fetch master directly from a git repo | 11:42:28 |
| Sandro | but when you are using flakes or niv then it works again | 11:42:42 |
| Henson | is that better than denoting the patch level using a version string change or something like that? | 11:45:08 |
| Sandro | So you want to start version numbers like debian has? | 11:45:47 |
| Sandro | I am not looking forward to things like 2.0.0+really1.16.0-2ubuntu2 | 11:47:08 |
| Henson | I don't know. I've used Debian for decades and I'm familiar with it so that's where that idea is coming from. Changing the version name would require somebody to remember to do it, whereas checking the channel hash wouldn't. But checking the channel hash is more difficult than just checking to see what version string is in the package name in the nix store | 11:47:13 |
| Henson | Sandro: yeah, that does get a little ridiculous | 11:47:25 |
| Synthetica | I'm not sure that isn't preferable to the current situation where 1.15.1 is vulnerable but 1.15.1 isn't. | 11:48:17 |
| Sandro | nix is smarter than apt with its versions. We don't need such crazy version numbers. | 11:49:20 |
