Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announced

I'm not a fan of sudo. It's does so much it needs BNF to describe it's configuration format. Who knows, maybe replacing the configuration with polkit is a good idea. Still it's a stand alone binary with one clear job to do, simple enough that one person has no trouble getting their head around it so it's not surprising it hasn't had too many problems over it's long life time.

This made me smile:

> sudo has serious problems though. It's a relatively large SUID binary, i.e. privileged code that unprivileged users can invoke from their own context. It has a complicating configuration language, loadable plugins (ldap!), hostname matches and so on and so on.

That is a bit rich coming from the author of systemd, which must be in the running for one of the largest bodies of code that must run as root. It's also a very complex piece of code. That complexity is the reason I was completely flummoxed by interactions between systemd and dll's being exploited by the XZ utils hack to attack an unrelated and uncompromised binary: openssh. Run0 is just an extension of that ball of mud. It's a stretch to believe it will be more secure than sudo in the long term, which is amusing because it appears Lennarts primary argument is it will be more secure.

I'm not the only one who has noticed this: https://lwn.net/Articles/971812/

The article you linked seems to be in support that systemd is in fact simpler than sudo.

Sudo, which only does privilege escalations, is only 1/3 the amount of code of the entirety of systemd.

Systemd-run has been around for many years now, this is simply an expansion of capabilities of features already exposed.