Thread: System call with root level privileges

Why not run your program with root privilages, you don't need to login as root, you can use sudo for example.

Originally Posted by g4j31a5

Hi, I needed my application to change the hardware date & time with a system call to "hwclock". Unfortunately, "hwclock" requires a root / superuser level access. I could make the machine to always log with root though I think it will be a bad practice. I just needed this code to work:

Typically this is solved by creating a small setuid binary owned by root. This program does nothing except launch hwclock with root privileges, then quits. Anybody can run this program and it will execute with root privileges.

When writing such things, you must write PERFECT code. Never use system(). Never look at the PATH variable or any other environment variable (an evil user could change them to cause your program to do bad things). Do what you need to do and then give up privileges as soon as possible.

In this specific case, DEFINITELY don't use system() to launch the hwclock program. The system() call launches a shell. The shell looks in the path. The path may have been set to point to some malicious "hwclock" program that compromises the entire system.

In fact, maybe I shouldn't even be explaining how to do this. Be careful!

EDIT: I also think that sudo is the best way to do this. sudo is pretty well tested.

FWIW - changing system time is NOT something any joe blow should be allowed to do.
Run by sysadmins only, ie. somebody who is root or can su to run the code. setuid is, IMO, a bad idea.

Can you not use stime() or settimeofday() ? These also require privilege and are pretty standard in most unixes - POSIX does not specify how a system's time is set.