sudo without a setuid binary or SSH over a UNIX socket

In this post, I will detail how to replace sudo (a setuid binary) by using SSH over a local UNIX socket.

I am of the opinion that setuid/setgid binaries are a UNIX legacy that should be deprecated. I will explain the security reasons behind that statement in a future post.

This is related to the work of the Confined Users SIG in Fedora.

Why bother?

The main benefit of this approach is that it enables root access to the host from any unprivileged toolbox / distrobox container. This is particularly useful on Fedora Atomic desktops (Silverblue, Kinoite, Sericea, Onyx) or Universal Blue (Bluefin, Bazzite) for example.

As a side effect of this setup, we also get the following security advantages:

• No longer rely on sudo as a setuid binary for privileged operations.
• Access control via a physical hardware token (here a Yubikey) for each privileged operation.

Setting up the server

Create the following systemd units:

/etc/systemd/system/sshd-unix.socket:

[Unit]
Description=OpenSSH Server Unix Socket
Documentation=man:sshd(8) man:sshd_config(5)

[Socket]
ListenStream=/run/sshd.sock
Accept=yes

[Install]
WantedBy=sockets.target

/etc/systemd/system/sshd-unix@.service:

[Unit]
Description=OpenSSH per-connection server daemon (Unix socket)
Documentation=man:sshd(8) man:sshd_config(5)
Wants=sshd-keygen.target
After=sshd-keygen.target

[Service]
ExecStart=-/usr/sbin/sshd -i -f /etc/ssh/sshd_config_unix
StandardInput=socket

Create a dedicated configuration file /etc/ssh/sshd_config_unix:

# Deny all non key based authentication methods
PermitRootLogin prohibit-password
PasswordAuthentication no
PermitEmptyPasswords no
GSSAPIAuthentication no

# Only allow access for specific users
AllowUsers root tim

# The default is to check both .ssh/authorized_keys and .ssh/authorized_keys2
# but this is overridden so installations will only check .ssh/authorized_keys
AuthorizedKeysFile .ssh/authorized_keys

# override default of no subsystems
Subsystem sftp /usr/libexec/openssh/sftp-server

Enable and start the new socket unit:

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
$ sudo systemctl enable --now sshd-unix.socket

Add your SSH Key to /root/.ssh/authorized_keys.

Setting up the client

Install socat and use the following snippet in /.ssh/config:

Host host.local
    User root
    # We use `run/host/run` instead of `/run` to transparently work in and out of containers
    ProxyCommand socat - UNIX-CLIENT:/run/host/run/sshd.sock
    # Path to your SSH key. See: https://tim.siosm.fr/blog/2023/01/13/openssh-key-management/
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/keys/localroot
    # Force TTY allocation to always get an interactive shell
    RequestTTY yes
    # Minimize log output
    LogLevel QUIET

Test your setup:

$ ssh host.local
[root@phoenix ~]#

Shell alias

Let’s create a sudohost shell “alias” (function) that you can add to your Bash or ZSH config to make using this command easier:

# Get an interactive root shell or run a command as root on the host
sudohost() {
    if [[ ${#} -eq 0 ]]; then
        cmd="$(printf "exec \"%s\" --login" "${SHELL}")"
        ssh host.local "${cmd}"
    else
        cmd="$(printf "cd \"%s\"; exec %s" "${PWD}" "$*")"
        ssh host.local "${cmd}"
    fi
}

2024-01-12 update: Fix quoting and array expansion (thanks to o11c).

Test the alias:

$ sudohost id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root) context=unconfined_u:unconfined_r:unconfined_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023
$ sudohost pwd
/var/home/tim
$ sudohost ls
Desktop Downloads ...

We’ll keep a distinct alias for now as we’ll still have a need for the “real” sudo in our toolbox containers.

Security?

As-is, this setup is basically a free local root for anything running under your current user that has access to your SSH private key. This is however likely already the case on most developer’s workstations if you are part of the wheel, sudo or docker groups, as any code running under your user can edit your shell config and set a backdoored alias for sudo or run arbitrary privileged containers via Docker. sudo itself is not a security boundary as commonly configured by default.

To truly increase our security posture, we would instead need to remove sudo (and all other setuid binaries) and run our session under a fully unprivileged, confined user, but that’s for a future post.

Setting up U2F authentication with an sk-based SSH key-pair

To make it more obvious when commands are run as root, we can setup SSH authentication using U2F with a Yubikey as an example. While this, by itself, does not, strictly speaking, increase the security of this setup, this makes it harder to run commands without you being somewhat aware of it.

First, we need to figure out which algorithm are supported by our Yubikey:

$ lsusb -v 2>/dev/null | grep -A2 Yubico | grep "bcdDevice" | awk '{print $2}'

If the value is 5.2.3 or higher, then we can use ed25519-sk, otherwise we’ll have to use ecdsa-sk to generate the SSH key-pair:

$ ssh-keygen -t ed25519-sk
# or
$ ssh-keygen -t ecdsa-sk

Add the new sk-based SSH public key to /root/.ssh/authorized_keys.

Update the server configuration to only accept sk-based SSH key-pairs:

/etc/ssh/sshd_config_unix:

# Only allow sk-based SSH key-pairs authentication methods
PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes sk-ecdsa-sha2-nistp256@openssh.com,sk-ssh-ed25519@openssh.com

...

Restricting access to a subset of users

You can also further restrict the access to the UNIX socket by configuring classic user/group UNIX permissions:

/etc/systemd/system/sshd-unix.socket:

...

[Socket]
...
SocketUser=tim
SocketGroup=tim
SocketMode=0660
...

Then reload systemd’s configuration and restart the socket unit.

Next steps: Disabling sudo

Now that we have a working alias to run privileged commands, we can disable sudo access for our user.

Important backup / pre-requisite step

Make sure that you have a backup and are able to boot from a LiveISO in case something goes wrong.

Set a strong password for the root account. Make sure that can locally log into the system via a TTY console.

If you have the classic sshd server enabled and listening on the network, make sure to disable remote login as root or password logins.

Removing yourself from the wheel / sudo groups

Open a terminal running as root (i.e. don’t use sudo for those commands) and remove you users from the wheel or sudo groups using:

$ usermod -dG wheel tim

You can also update the sudo config to remove access for users that are part of the wheel group:

# Comment / delete this line
%wheel  ALL=(ALL)       ALL

Removing the setuid binaries

To fully benefit from the security advantage of this setup, we need to remove the setuid binaries (sudo and su).

If you can, uninstall sudo and su from your system. This is usually not possible due to package dependencies (su is part of util-linux on Fedora).

Another option is to remove the setuid bit from the sudo and su binaries:

$ chmod u-s $(which sudo)
$ chmod u-s $(which su)

You will have to re-run those commands after each update on classic systems.

Setting this up for Fedora Atomic desktops is a little bit different as /usr is read only. This will be the subject of an upcoming blog post.

Conclusion

Like most of the time with security, this is not a silver bullet solution that will make your system “more secure” (TM). I have been working on this setup as part of my investigation to reduce our reliance on setuid binaries and trying to figure out alternatives for common use cases.

Let me know if you found this interesting as that will likely motivate me to write the next part!

References

• Pull request for openssh-portable to enable the SSH client to connect directly to a UNIX socket (will remove the need for socat): enable ssh connection to a unix socket
• SSH connect to a UNIX socket instead of hostname
• How to configure SSH with YubiKey Security Keys U2F Authentication on Ubuntu

Other posts from this series

• Don’t change your login shell, use a better terminal emulator