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jcgl 3 days ago  [ - ]

> this will not take off I'm afraid, because locking these unitfiles down is offloaded to the end-user

Maybe your point is that this isn't done by the vendor in practice. And I'm sure there's room for lots of improvement. However, one of the great things about how systemd units can be provided by the vendor and seamlessly tweaked by the administrator is that the vendor (i.e. packager and/or distro) can set these up easily.

There definitely are packages that ship with locked-down files. Tor and powerdns (pdns) are two off the top of my head.

  → Overall exposure level for pdns.service: 1.9 OK 
  → Overall exposure level for tor.service: 7.1 MEDIUM
DyslexicAtheist 3 days ago  [ - ]

I think it should be done by the maintainer of the software not by the distro. My concern is that these features are available since at least 5 years and it has not yet caught on (regardless of what this blog article recommends).

It would be great to see it implemented but for now at least on Debian/sid the situation is as follows:

  UNIT                                 EXPOSURE PREDICATE
  ModemManager.service                      6.3 MEDIUM    
  NetworkManager.service                    7.8 EXPOSED   
  alsa-state.service                        9.6 UNSAFE    
  anacron.service                           9.6 UNSAFE    
  atop.service                              9.6 UNSAFE    
  atopacct.service                          9.6 UNSAFE    
  avahi-daemon.service                      9.6 UNSAFE    
  blueman-mechanism.service                 9.6 UNSAFE    
  bluetooth.service                         6.0 MEDIUM    
  cron.service                              9.6 UNSAFE    
  dbus.service                              9.3 UNSAFE    
  dictd.service                             9.6 UNSAFE    
  dm-event.service                          9.5 UNSAFE    
  dnscrypt-proxy.service                    8.1 EXPOSED   
  emergency.service                         9.5 UNSAFE    
  exim4.service                             6.9 MEDIUM    
  getty@tty1.service                        9.6 UNSAFE    
  irqbalance.service                        1.2 OK        
  lvm2-lvmpolld.service                     9.5 UNSAFE    
  polkit.service                            1.2 OK        
  rc-local.service                          9.6 UNSAFE    
  rescue.service                            9.5 UNSAFE    
  rtkit-daemon.service                      7.2 MEDIUM    
  smartmontools.service                     9.6 UNSAFE    
  systemd-ask-password-console.service      9.4 UNSAFE    
  systemd-ask-password-wall.service         9.4 UNSAFE    
  systemd-bsod.service                      9.5 UNSAFE    
  systemd-hostnamed.service                 1.7 OK        
  systemd-journald.service                  4.9 OK        
  systemd-logind.service                    2.8 OK        
  systemd-networkd.service                  2.9 OK        
  systemd-timesyncd.service                 2.1 OK        
  systemd-udevd.service                     7.1 MEDIUM    
  tor@default.service                       6.6 MEDIUM    
  udisks2.service                           9.6 UNSAFE    
  upower.service                            2.4 OK        
  user@1000.service                         9.4 UNSAFE    
  wpa_supplicant.service                    9.6 UNSAFE
jcgl 3 days ago  [ - ]

> I think it should be done by the maintainer of the software not by the distro

Why would you say that? I would agree that the developer likely has better insight into what the software needs. But the security boundary exists at the interface of the application and the system, so I think that both application devs and system devs (i.e. distros) have something to contribute here.

And because systemd allows for composition of these settings, it doesn't have to be a one-or-the other situation--a distro can do some basic locking down (e.g. limiting SUID, DynamicUser, etc.), and then the application dev can do syscall filtering.

In any case, I agree that I'd like to see things get even more locked down. But it's worth remembering that, before systemd, there was basically no easy-to-use least-privilege stuff available beyond Unix users and filesystem permissions. The closest you had (afaik) was apparmor and selinux. In both of those cases, the distro basically had to do all the work to create the security policy.

Also, n.b., that pdns.service I noted is provided by PowerDNS themselves.