this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2024
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The concern is not storage space, but potential bugs leading to security issues. For OpenBSD this is very important, and so they made doas.
I understand the concern - but it's not warranted. LOC is a bad predictor of security. And fwiw /usr/bin/sudo on my system is only 227K.
The OpenBSD team does fantastic work. I'm assuming doas will be a good tool and probably more secure that sudo generally. But "size" isn't the best way to determine that. It's not even a good way.
Tedu (author of doas) wrote about it in 2015:
"There were some concerns that sudo was too big, running too much code in a privileged process. And there was also pressure to enable even more options, because the feature set shipped in base wasn’t big enough. (As shipped in OpenBSD, the compiled sudo was already five times larger than just about any other setuid program.)"
https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/doas