I noticed Debian does this by default and Arch wiki recommends is citing improved security and upstream.

I don’t get why that’s more secure. Is this assuming torrents might be infected and aims to limit what a virus may access to the dedicated user’s home directory (/var/lib/transmission-daemon on Debian)?

  • mik@sh.itjust.works
    11·
    1 month ago

    It helps protect you because if the application in question is compromised in any way (or has a flaw, i.e. an accidental rm -rf /*), the only access it has is limited to the user it is run as. If it is run as root, it has full administrative privilege.

    • Tobias Hunger@programming.dev
      5·
      1 month ago

      Not only that: It protects your data. The Unix security model is unfortunately stuck in the 1970s: It protects users from each other. That is a wonderful property, but in todays world you also need to protect the users from the applications they are running: Anything running as your user has access to all your data. And on most computer systems the interesting data is the one the users out there: Cryptogrqphic keys, login information, financial information, … . Typically users are much more upset to loose their data than about some virus infecting the OS files, those are trivial to fix.

      Running anything as anlther user stops that application from having access to most of your data.

          • BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
            6·
            1 month ago

            The point of security isn’t just protecting yourself from the threats you’re aware of. Maybe there’s a compromise in your distro’s password hashing, maybe your password sucks, maybe there’s a kernel compromise. Maybe the torrent client isn’t a direct route to root, but one step in a convoluted chain of attack. Maybe there are “zero days” that are only called such because the clear web hasn’t been made aware yet, but they’re floating around on the dark web already. Maybe your passwords get leaked by a flaw in Lemmy’s security.

            You don’t know how much you don’t know, so you should be implementing as much good security practices as you can. It’s called the “Swiss Cheese” model of security: you layer enough so that the holes in one layer are blocked by a different layer.

            Plus, keeping strong security measures in place for something that’s almost always internet connected is a good idea regardless of how cautious you think you’re being. It’s why modern web-browsers are basically their own VM inside your pc anymore, and it’s why torrent clients shouldn’t have access to anything besides the download/upload folders and whatever minimal set of network perms they need.

            • nanook@friendica.eskimo.com
              1·
              1 month ago

              @BaumGeist @Quail4789 If you get software from an untrusted source, and it does not matter if it’s a torrent, ftp, https, scp, etc, you run this risk. And usually when you download with a torrent the supplying site will publish a hash which you can compare to make sure that it wasn’t corrupted in transit.

          • nanook@friendica.eskimo.com
            1·
            1 month ago

            @Quail4789 @[email protected] just.works there is not a known exploit in sudo but there IS a known exploit in the library it uses to elevate privileges, at least in older versions. Also I make full system weekly backups so worst comes to worst I’m never going to lose more than a weeks data.

        • mik@sh.itjust.works
          5·
          1 month ago

          It may be mostly “security theater” but it requires almost no extra effort and drastically increases the difficulty of compromise by adding privilege escalation as another requirement to gaining root access.

          • loutr@sh.itjust.works
            4·
            1 month ago

            The point is also to minimize potential damages caused by a bug in the software. Just this year there have been multiple data-destroying bugs in publicly released software. If the app runs as a server it’s usually trivial to have it run as a dedicated user, with just enough permissions to do its job.

            It’s just good practice, even though the risks might be low why risk it at all?

          • Fonzie!@ttrpg.network
            1·
            1 month ago

            Not yet, but if every system was only protected against what already happened instead of also what could happen, we’d get hacked a lot more often!