Safe Delegation in Linux: Users managing groups
Channel: DevConf
Date: 2019-10-03

Speaker: Adam Young

The Unix permission model allows for 3 levels of permission: owner, group, and everyone. Only the group model allows some level of user input into selecting a subset of users. The centralized nature of the /etc/groups file means that only the root user can modify it, and control group access.

In this session, I will discuss a tool that builds on this model to allow end users to safely manage group membership using the existing mechanisms and a suid binary call delegated. This mechanism will improve machine security by minimizing the amount of users that require sudo permission to perform day-2 operations.