Potential changes to stop Kate and Dolphin running as root?

English Applications
1

I have found out (the hard way) that on Fedora 27 and apparently on other distros that running Dolphin and Kate as root is no longer permitted. Apparently KDE devs are determined to roll this out as they believe it is a security exposure. Now so far this has not happened on openSUSE but my reason for posting is to try and find out whether this is likely to happen here? I know there are patches around for Dolphin and Kate to circumvent this. To be honest it does seem very draconian. On fedora 27 it is not possible to get Kate to open and they expect nano to be used or perhaps sudoedit having set SUDO_EDITOR to be Kate.

Stuart

2

Hi
Not had a need to move stuff as root via a gui, but logic would tell me if the ssh service is running, then in your file browser gui, sftp://root@localhost would work…

You don’t need to open any ports via the firewall either if not using on your networ.k.

3

You’re late.
This was done nearly a year ago already.

Since 17.04.0 (released in April 2017!) Kate/kwrite and dolphin now check if they are run as root, and abort in this case.
See Executing Dolphin as root is not possible. - Applications - openSUSE Forums

Now so far this has not happened on openSUSE but my reason for posting is to try and find out whether this is likely to happen here?

It has happened on openSUSE as well of course, as it is (was) an upstream change.
But we actively patch dolphin and kate/kwrite to remove that check since April, and I am not aware of any plans to change that.

4

OTOH, the KDE developers worked on adding kauth support to kio in the last months, which means that dolphin will just ask for the root password as necessary in the future, and there should be no need at all to run it as root.

Kate/kwrite already do this since a while (i.e. ktexteditor asks for the root password if you try to save a file and don’t have the necessary permissions), but openSUSE’s security team rejected that so far.

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Thanks for the explanation. Yes I may have been late but was trying F27 because I have an application which is problematic under openSUSE :wink:

Stuart