I noticed Debian does this by default and Arch wiki recommends is citing improved security and upstream.
I don’t get why that’s more secure. Is this assuming torrents might be infected and aims to limit what a virus may access to the dedicated user’s home directory (/var/lib/transmission-daemon on Debian)?
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It may be mostly “security theater” but it requires almost no extra effort and drastically increases the difficulty of compromise by adding privilege escalation as another requirement to gaining root access.
Has there ever been such an exploit? Given all other torrent clients I’ve seen just run as your user by default, is there something different in transmission over others that make it more vulnerable?
The point is also to minimize potential damages caused by a bug in the software. Just this year there have been multiple data-destroying bugs in publicly released software. If the app runs as a server it’s usually trivial to have it run as a dedicated user, with just enough permissions to do its job.
It’s just good practice, even though the risks might be low why risk it at all?
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Not yet, but if every system was only protected against what already happened instead of also what could happen, we’d get hacked a lot more often!