rudo

rudo is a toy sudo clone written in Rust that aims to serve as a learning tool as well as (potentially) a useful system administration tool.

DISCLAIMER: This is a toy. This has not undergone any formal security analysis. I am not a security expert. Use at your own risk.

Why?

I wanted to learn Rust by writing a project that would highlight its strengths as a safe systems programming language. Many other command-line utilities have been rewritten in Rust, but to my knowledge sudo has not.

Eventually, rudo may reach a high level of security and usability and become useful as a system administration tool, but for now it's mostly an experiment.

Supported Platforms

rudo has been tested on both Linux and macOS, but it should work on any *nix with PAM.

Automatic Installation

To automatically install rudo, simply clone the repository and run the included install.sh as root. Note that you will need a Rust environment (I recommend using rustup) as well as the PAM header files for your system.

$ git clone https://github.com/shawnanastasio/rudo
# ./install.sh

Once the installation is complete, you can edit the configuration file at /etc/rudo.json to include your user.

Example:

{
  "prompt": "Password: ",
  "allowed_users": [
    {
      "username": "root",
      "permissions": { "allowed_commands": [ "*" ] }
    },
    {
      "username": "shawnanastasio",
      "permissions": { "allowed_commands": [ "whoami", "ls" ] }
    }
  ]
}

To enable (experimental) TouchID on newer macs, call ./install.sh with --features macos_extra:

# ./install.sh --features macos_extra

Once the feature is enabled, rudo will attempt to authenticate with TouchID. If TouchID authentication fails, rudo will fall back to PAM password authentication.

Manual Installation

See install.sh for full list of steps.

TODO

• Add more granular control over permissions system
• Make configuration file less ugly

License

All code is licensed under the MIT license. See LICENSE for more information.

Fork Me

Pull requests and suggestions are welcome!