Contributor
Allan E. Gardner

OSTree: Drop privileges for HTTP fetches


Mentors
Giuseppe Scrivano
Organization
Fedora Project

OSTree currently runs as root while doing all operations, including doing fetches from external repositories over HTTP. But libsoup is not exactly a secure well-tested library, and few projects use it. Running the fetch operations in a separate low-privileged process will add more security, as will switching to libcurl.

Furthermore, the aria2 project implements a feature not found in Curl or LibSoup, namely multiplexing downloads from multiple servers. (e.g. for file A, aria2 can download 50% from server 1 and 50% from server 2). Moving to an external process will allow a pluggable fetching implementation, allowing the use of aria2's features for those who want it

Further work may be done for the Fedora Modularization WG or ostree-related projects (such as GNOME Continuous)

Full project proposal: https://fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?title=GSOC_2016/Student_Application_allangardner