#1124328 kobodeluxe: is setgid, can this be avoided?

Package:
kobodeluxe
Source:
kobodeluxe
Description:
game of space battle
Submitter:
Simon McVittie
Date:
2025-12-30 18:29:03 UTC
Severity:
normal
#1124328#5
Date:
2025-12-30 18:27:40 UTC
From:
To:
The /usr/games/kobodl executable is setgid games.

Because this game depends on libraries that make no attempt to avoid
privilege escalation from the caller to the games group, this use of
setgid is basically security theatre: it's essentially equivalent to
making the high scores world-writeable.

In particular, because this game depends on SDL, it's very easy to use
it to escalate privileges to the games group. SDL is not designed to be
used by set*id executables (reference:
https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/issues/14717).

Discussion on the debian-devel-games list starting at
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-games/2025/12/msg00016.html (or
equivalently
https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/aVFQ7HtjX7cYSnIp@remnant.pseudorandom.co.uk)
indicates that several games team members think the complexity cost and
security implications of games being setgid are too high a price to pay
for a shared high-score table on multi-user systems.

Could this game be modified to save high-scores to a per-user location
instead? In SDL 2, the SDL_PrefPath() is likely to be the most suitable
place. Unfortunately SDL 1.2 does not provide that function, but it
could be copied or reimplemented if necessary.

Thanks,
    smcv