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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • So as another comment pointed out you don’t need to give your user account access to docker in this way, it’s an optional step, but one that I suspect many people do (since it’s part of the official docs).

    What the LLM has done is silly, but completely possible. It climbed through the window that you left open.

    But let’s jump to a different scenario, the ping command (on Linux). That’s a perfectly harmless command, right? You just want to say hello to another computer and see if they say hello back.

    Except that historically the ping command was something called “setuid” which means when it ran it ran as root. It ran as root because in order for ping to work it has to create a special type of network packet that only root can create. But if you’re root you can run anything! So in theory ping opens a huge attack surface. If you have to worry about ping then is everything too complex to be manageable?

    Luckily, as I said, this is a historical problem. The permissions ping needs have been moved to a specific capability and the command changed to utilize it and now ping can just run as a regular user without root privileges. But you can’t just make that change overnight. It takes a lot of time and effort.

    So could the same be done for docker? Maybe. A rootless version of docker already exists. If you actually wanted to do what the LLM suggested, that wouldn’t work with a rootless docker, at least not without a bunch more configuration (and even then maybe).

    So is security hard? Yes. Is it impossible? No.



  • Sure. So we don’t know the original question but we can see that changes were made to SDDM, which is basically your login screen. So the original request was probably something like “Can you change my login screen to do something cool?”

    Now, the configuration for the login screen is located in /etc and requires administrative privileges to change.

    The query was run by the user account and not an admin account. Typically to run something as admin you use the command sudo which will interactively ask for a password and then, if allowed, you can run the command as an admin.

    However the tool docker, in order to function properly, has the ability to run commands as administrator and won’t prompt for a password.

    So basically what happened here is instead of asking for a key to unlock the front door to your house, it installed a new door on the second floor, went through that door, rearranged your refrigerator, went back out the door it created, and then patched up the hole perfectly.




  • I don’t use DoorDash but occasionally order from Taco Bell. Every time I order I watch the car arrive at Taco Bell and wait about 20 minutes before actually picking up my order and then delivering it.

    Additionally I know UberEats used to (and maybe still does) offer cheaper delivery if you pick a restaurant another driver was already heading to. (I haven’t used UberEats in years because I found them less reliable.)

    Ironically if a restaurant did all the deliveries themselves they would have all the information about how best to optimize delivery. Maybe all the delivery companies can find a way to share this information to minimize travel and maximize speed of delivery.