[Haskell-cafe] GHC bindist permissions (Was: [ANNOUNCE] GHC 9.4.1-rc1 is now available)

[Bardur Arantsson]

On 08/08/2022 15.59, Brandon Allbery wrote:
> I think umask addresses a different issue than "unprivileged user". In
> any case, yes, 077 is fairly uncommon; if you have that much need for
> privacy then perhaps you should not be using the system in the first
> place.
> 

Yes and no. It prevents a program which drops privileges (e.g. sshd) at
the start from reading arbitrary user files, so if there are
post-startup remote vulnerabilities it's unable to exfiltrate all your
user data.

(Obviously one has to trust the program up to that point, but that's a
much smaller attack surface.)

I find it a good general practice in terms of Defense in Depth --
especially as it actually really shouldn't cause issues one a
single-user system. (It *is* probably uncommon as you say, though. I
believe most distros default to 022.)

Regards,