Re: Secure privilege escalation

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi James,

James Carthew wrote:
> I want a way to escalate the privileges of my application to root 
> level, but only for the specific function. I also only want the user 
> to authenticate once and then have their escalated privilege exist 
> until they close the plugin. Similar to the unlock padlock button in 
> OSX's SystemPreferences.app. Does anyone know howto implement this?

no.. I have never found a portable way of doing this that would doing 
this that would work at least on Linux and BSDs.
I even wonder if Mac offers an API to do it that we should reimplement.

lacking that, i never added certain features to SystemPreferences myself 
wanting it to remain portable.

I think of a couple of approaches. The most portable would be to 
interact somehow with sudo, being it either present in base system or 
available as a package on most systems I can think of.

Another question is how it actually works on Apple. On my mac I am both 
a user and an admin user, so it looks I am authenticating myself 
essentially. But in case I were Joe and admin were Bob, would I be 
entering Joe's or Bob's password?

Riccardo