MATE without GVFS / automount / udisks

[NTU]

Hey, I was just wondering if anyone has looked into trimming down MATE's control center and Caja to remove the automounting, udisks, and gvfs? Those are just extra ways to break into a Linux system and screw it up. An infected android phone that uses MTP for example can utilize udisks/gvfs and the TUN/TAP driver and cause all kinds of issues on the PC it's connected to. I was forced to re-install the entire system again to get it to behave normally again. I know this from experience, it happened to me, but I didn't have AIDE running at the time of the Android phone attacking my Gentoo box so I'm not sure exactly what happened. I plugged it in again on a Gentoo system that didn't have MATE installed, rather only LXDE, without gvfs, udisks or any automounting enabled, as well as the TUN/TAP kernel driver disabled and the phone had no effect. I'm not sure which exact feature it is, but is there any info out there about gvfs and udisks being a security vulnerability? I like MATE but if it's a security risk, it's not worth a pretty desktop, for me anyway. Thoughts? Thanks!

Putting this in development section because it pertains to modifying MATE, but also a security question, so not sure what thread this belongs in the most. Please move where you feel it more appropriate. (not sure how to word that last part)

[eccerr0r]

What???

Connecting an MTP device should not affect the machine, at most it would affect only the current user (unless you were using root with MATE, BAD BAD BAD). Need more details, so you actually clicked on something on your phone over MTP and it took over your machine? Or you enabled autorun?

If not, it's a bug that needs to be reported upstream as this should not happen. It seems that if your phone got infected somehow, other peoples' systems should have got infected and this should have been resolved in the gvfs/udisks/automount code by now and fairly well known, though I haven't seen anything. This most likely is user error unless you can pinpoint a specific piece of malware on your android phone that's triggering this, and send it upstream so it can be fixed.

On the other hand I do not know how long you can specify something like

[NTU]

Thank you for the polkit policy! Yeah I'm not sure, it was awhile ago, 2 years maybe? So if nobody else is aware of udisks or gvfs being a security risk, it's possible I did something stupid but I've been wary of those two things since.

Cheers mate!

[eccerr0r]

There's always a risk but the idea is that it should be written to minimize risk.

GVFS should simply be a convenience factor. It doesn't require root privileges, it merely maps things that wouldn't normally be considered a filesystem into a virtual filesystem - so you can get gvfs-capable applications to edit an off system file like sftp://different.host/file.txt seamlessly.

udisks, however, does eventually require root privileges. This, if written wrong, can have security implications. It tries to mitigate these by default:

- Only the console user can mount. This is the equivalent permissions of the so-called "evil maid" who has physical access to your hardware anyway.
- The idea is hopefully nothing really stupid is done: thus, there are several rules: you can't mount things over /bin, /sbin, etc. (it explicitly wants you to mount in /media or something so it can't interfere with the system) and it will prohibit you from using setuid binaries. For filesystems where the concept of "user" doesn't make sense (like FAT), it tries to make it easy for the user as possible - it sets permissions to only the console user.
- and yeah it was designed so that you can disable the feature without recompiling (like if your console, though you may be sitting at it, is actually physically secure and you don't want people plugging in disks to steal data.)

Please let people know if you see damage caused by plugging something in to a udisks user-mount system, it's a bug of some sort.
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