[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#805449: Amplification

[Barak A. Pearlmutter]

Thanks for the detailed analysis of the technical difficulty of
allowing dbus to be restarted. It really does sound like some
unfortunate design decisions were made. However, I don't think it
would be quite impossible to work around. E.g., the libraries used to
connect to dbus could be modified to attempt to silently reconnect,
and a replay daemon could record and replay events upon request to
allow the reconnecting processes to see what they'd missed. I'll grant
that it would be a serious undertaking. On the other hand, it really
is a pretty dire situation when patching a dbus security bug is as
disruptive to high-availability systems as patching a kernel security
bug.

If I might ask, how is this currently handled with
unattended-upgrades? The whole point of enabling unattended upgrades
for security is to avoid running vulnerable systems, even when the
system has no babysitter. This would seem to mandate a triggered
unattended reboot. But that's not being done right now; I'm not even
sure we have a trigger for that. Just leaving the system vulnerable
until a coincidental reboot doesn't seem appropriate.

--Barak.