This project was created for the Fall 2021 Semester of CS 3210 at Georgia Tech. It is a re-implementation of sudo that experiments with moving as much computation off the root user as possible. That is, it aims to have most of the code in unprivileged binaries, with those programs only execing to escalate privilege when absolutely necessary.

See also the

• Proposal
• Final Report

The binaries and documentation for this project can be obtained from the Releases section. The versions present there were compiled with all features enabled. If this is undesireable, it is possible to compile the binary manually.

This project has a Docker container with the environment necesary to build this project. Simply clone this repository and mount it as a volume at /usr/local/src/sus/ - the initial working directory.

Alternatively, it is possible to set up the environment manually. Like most Rust projects, sus uses cargo as a build system. The container comes with version 1.56.0. It also uses the rustfmt and clippy components for formatting and linting respectively, as well as cargo-audit version 0.15.2 to check for known vulnerable dependencies. To automate the build process, sus also uses cargo-make version 0.35.5.

Once the environment is set up, sus can be built with

$ cargo make sus-dist-build

This will compile the project with the default features, unlike the Releases page which compiles with all features.

At the moment, it's necessary to edit the Makefile.toml to select which features to build. Under [tasks.sus-dist-build], edit

env = { "CARGO_MAKE_CARGO_BUILD_TEST_FLAGS" = "" }

to instead contain the arguments to be passed to cargo-build.

The Makefile.toml has an install target. It automatically builds the application and installs it to the configured location. This can be invoked with

$ cargo make install

Alternatively, it is possible to manually install the project by copying over the binaries from the target/release/ directory and changing their permissions.

A default configuration is given in the config/ folder, and the builds on the Releases page use it. However, the parameters in those files can be edited.

As this program is written in Rust, the binaries can be run like any other program once they are compiled.

The arguments to the sus-kernel binary are defined in config/sus-kernel.rs by all the parameters ending in _IDX. However, ideally the kernel should not be run directly. Instead, a wrapper program should be used to parse user arguments and massage them into the "computer-friendly" format used by the kernel. Sadly, no such program exists at the moment.