[Rcpp-devel] How to elevate privilege from within Rcpp?

[Bhaskar V. Karambelkar]

Thanks Dirk,
I was afraid of that, but glad that you confirmed it. In the mean time I've
figured out a way that may not require root :)

thanks again
Bhaskar

On Sun, Mar 15, 2015 at 4:14 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:

>
> On 15 March 2015 at 15:48, Bhaskar V. Karambelkar wrote:
> | I need to call a 3rd party library function with root privileges.
> | I'm not sure how to accomplish this from within Rcpp.
>
> I dont think you can ...
>
> | If I was writing an executable, I could call seteuid to elevate
> privileges
> | before calling the external function, and set the suid bit on the
> executable.
> | But given that this needs to be done from within a Rcpp Library, I'm not
> sure
> | how to do this. The last thing I want to do is run R as root or set suid
> on the
> | R binary.
>
> ... unless you run R with suid bits, which you shouldn't as you rightly
> point out.
>
> Rcpp is standard C/C++ code. So the wisdom of 'man seteuid' still applies:
>
>    seteuid() sets the effective user ID of the calling process.
> Unprivileged
>    user processes may only set the effective user ID to the real user ID,
> the
>    effective user ID or the saved set-user-ID.
>
> | Any help / pointers would be greatly appreciated.
>
> You may have to call a small self-contained executable which may then have
> a
> suid bit set.
>
> Dirk
>
> --
> http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org
>
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