On the one hand, doas is simpler. Less code means less bugs, and lower chance someone manages to hack it and gain admin rights. On the other hand, sudo is more popular, and so has a lot more people double-checking its security. Ultimately, I don't think it matters - when someone unauthorized gains admin rights, usually it's not due to bug in sudo or doas, but other problems.
this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2024
104 points (95.6% liked)
Linux
48153 readers
631 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Well said. Check your firewalls, check your ssh config, liberally use user repositories, and always tip the guard (donate to GNU)
I use doas just because. It's not necessary at all, but it can't hurt either (I think). It might be a bit more secure (fewer features -> fewer code -> fewer bugs -> fewer vulnerabilities, need to give password more often). Kinda cool if you want more minimalism for fun (I replaced startx with sx...)
You can change the config so you don't need to give the password every time.
Adding the persist option only requires it once every few minutes within a terminal session.
https://manpages.debian.org/bullseye/doas/doas.conf.5.en.html#persist
load more comments
(1 replies)
Doas is more secure, sudo has had a few critical vulnerabilities in the past, because the codebase is much larger. Sudo has like a million features that most people don't need, but they significantly increase attack surface.
Doas is more secure, sudo has had a few critical vulnerabilities in the past, because
.. it's newer. You wanted to say "it's newer." It has nowhere near the history, and looks better because it's newer.
Please, now, trot out the "use sudo if you're old" memes, because we grew that skin extra thick over the systemd counter-hate.
doas, afaik, was originally made for FreeBSD, so some of its features aren't compatible with/haven't been implemented for Linux. That may or may not be an important issue for you to consider.
OpenBSD actually, but close
From what I hear, doas is more secure. I don't think it matters though, as long as you keep your system updated. I use sudo still.
It's really only more secure in the sense that in general more complicated programs have more things that can go wrong with them. Either bugs, or just user error.
That is a valid concern, and most people don't need or use any of sudo's extra features, so it's completely reasonable to switch to doas because of that, but it's not like there's some glaring security flaw in sudo that most people really need to worry about. Especially if they're not doing weird things in the config, which would mostly be the same people who could easily switch to doas anyway.
Thank you I think I will stick with sudo.
How is it more secure?
Afaik much smaller code base and as such easier to audit.
load more comments
(7 replies)
I just use doas because sudo has a bunch of features i don't care about or use, and doas does everything i need while being significantly smaller.
Sudo is 6 megabytes
Damn, that's like 4 floppies!
The concern is not storage space, but potential bugs leading to security issues. For OpenBSD this is very important, and so they made doas.
load more comments
(2 replies)
6,054.0 kB, not 6 vs 14.0 kB
Ya know, I wish I could at least say something about being european and using commas instead of periods for decimal points, but I can't even say that. Still 6MB fully installed is nothing these days.
And here I am wondering what went so wrong with sudo that it needs 6 fucking mibibytes to work its simple magic.
Yeah, it's gonna take forever to download over my 14.4k baud modem.
STOP PICKING UP THE PHONE MOM!
Less lines of code needed means less chances of errors and potential vulnerabilities (if number and quality of eyeballs were the same)
Also only really applies if you are comparing programs in the same programming language as some programs have lines that are significantly more expressive than others. Conversely, some languages have constructs that are significantly more bug-prone than others (e.g. for loops with explicit integer indices instead of higher order functions like map or iterators to iterate over a collection).
load more comments
(1 replies)
No, but it's cleaner and designed for my usecase, and no real work to setup for me, all I had to do was add an alias
When I thought about this question, I decided to ditch both sudo and doas entirely. I am certain this is an unpopular opinion, but I preferred setting up a granular permission + user system instead, and keeping root privileges for only a handful of use cases (primarily for system updates and package installations).
For anything else, a dedicated user is created, and given only permissions to do that exact thing only. Many of these users have no shell access at all, and for the ones that do, I use a password manager so I don't have to memorize passwords for all of these users.
Did you know that you can configure sudo to only grant access to specific programs?
Yes I did, and that's a very good point. What sudo does not allow me to do is grant a user access to modify or read specific files or directories. I can get both that and access to executing specific programs using a users/groups permission system.
Another thing I don't like about sudo is that you end up using the same password for everything, which is also the password for logging in. Putting higher privileges behind my same login password opens me to a single point of failure.
load more comments
(15 replies)
Well, i believe in all showcased cases from people here, they are NOT replacing sudo entirely (Except if some are from BSD or if I'm incorrect with this assumption). They are just replacing their user habit with doas and use that command instead. In the end, all unix scripts or apps expect using sudo (If not, su) so... ### What's even the need to ?
- Size : Installed on top of the already system present sudo.
- Security : Only perhaps if you made a sudo alias to doas (But since it isn't entirely 1:1 identical, if anyone have a cleaner way of implementing that, I'm all hear)
- Simplicity : You now have two tools. A easy to use keycard, and a key. The second is more complicated to use, so you use it rarely but it's still two tools instead of one.
- Less dependencies : Again, unless you can actually replace it ENTIRELY, it's just an added tool (Still almost dependency free)
Really looking to corrections if i do some
Doas has about 90% of features with 10% of code size of sudo.
And rdo/ssu have ~140 lines of C code. Anyone knows similiar?
You feel smarter... Yeah, that's pretty much it.
I find the config syntax cleaner.
Security may be more likely to approve some users having doas, sudo is a no go in many restricted environment.
doas uses like 10MIB less of mem than sudo.
What's the point of using MiB if you're just gonna say "like" lol
Because it is not exactly 10MiB. Should have used about instead of like though.
load more comments
(7 replies)
BTW I use pkexec
view more: next ›