Is support being removed for ordinary users to run sshd?

[Jack Dodds]

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Hello Darren,

Thank you for the explanation. As long as a non-privileged user
can run sshd (listening on a high-numbered port), my application
is OK.

SSH is a great tool for those of us concerned about privacy. Your
work is really appreciated!

Jack

Darren Tucker <dtucker at zip.com.au> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 2:23 AM, Jack Dodds
> <brmdamon at hushmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Hello Darren,
> >
> > Could you comment on this issue being raised by myself and
> > Corinna Vinschen?
> >
> > This will create big problems for me.
> >
> > I'm not clear if this is a conscious decision supported by solid
> > reasons or if it is just collateral damage.
> >
> > Thank you for all you work!
> >
> > Jack DoDDs
> >
> > -------- Original Message --------
> > Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2017 16:31:03 +0200
> > Subject: Re: Announce: OpenSSH 7.5 released
> > From: Corinna Vinschen <vinschen at redhat.com>
> > To: openssh-unix-dev at mindrot.org
> >=
> > On Mar 24 12:38, Jack Dodds wrote:
> > > Hello,
> > >
> > > You seem to be saying that in 7.5, sshd can no longer be run
> > > under an ordinary user account. Is that accurate?
> >
> > Well, yes, that's what the report claims, and it seems correct to
> > me.
> >
> 
> It's not quite accurate. The issue is that it checks for the
> existence of the privsep user and directory even though it does
> not use them. If they exist (even if only because you
> configure'ed --with-privsep-user and --with-privsep-dir to
> point to other existing ones) then it'll work. This is what we
> use for the regression tests when SUDO is not set (but because
> all our test systems have the user and dir, we never observed
> the problem).
> 
> 
> > > I use sshd running under a user account in Debian Jessie to allow
> > > tunnels from remote devices. That capability is crucial to my
> > > application.
> > >
> > > Any comments would be appreciated.
> >
> > Same here.
> >
> > Is it really just a bug or is the "non-priv'ed user running sshd"
> > scenario going to be unsupported in future?
> >
> 
> My opinion:
>  - running as a non-privileged user should be supported.
>  - running with privsep disabled (ie one unprivileged process) will not be
> supported.
> 
> This will mean that you'll have two sshd processes per
> connection running as an unprivileged user, same as you would
> for a privileged user.
> 
> Rationale: we want to reduce the code complexity by removing
> the !privsep code paths, and some privilege dropping mechanisms
> like OpenSBD's pledge can still be employed by unprivileged
> code).
> 
> I've just committed a variation on the patch to both HEAD and
> the 7.5 branch.
> 
> https://anongit.mindrot.org/openssh.git/commit/?id=d13281f2964abc5f2e535e1613c77fc61b0c53e7
>

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