totally-safe-transmute VS sudo

For example, there is this (pure safe Rust) code: https://github.com/ben0x539/totally-safe-transmute/blob/main... which accesses external resources (/proc/self/mem) in order to violate the safety guarantees.

The first is the totally_safe_transmute crate. I mean, who wouldn't love library code that has .expect("welp") and .expect("oof") as its error handling? But that's not even the really scary part. Issue #2 ("i hate this") remains open to this day, but for obvious reasons there's no chance of resolution. This post has some context and a line-by-line explanation of how it works.

You mean like this?

You can also do that in rust on linux: https://github.com/ben0x539/totally-safe-transmute/blob/master/src/lib.rs

I want to correct this statement: Rust can be safer, but not if a library you use contains unsound code. Unsoundness is most often caused by unsafe code, but not always (totally_safe_transmute, anyone?). There is a misconception that unsafe code blocks are always unsound and should be avoided at all costs, but they're completely fine if the safety contracts are upheld. In fact, unsafe blocks isolate the potential issues to make it easier to identify where undefined behavior may be occurring. unsafe code blocks are a feature of the language, and their usage should not be viewed as opting out of any safety the language provides, imo.

Just reimplement totally_safe_transmute in Zig. No need for unsafe.

Why transmute() when you can totally_safe_transmute()?

Well, there is always the totally-safe-transmute.

They should use https://github.com/ben0x539/totally-safe-transmute

It depends on whether sudo was compiled with --disable-env-reset or not, it's on by default[1].

Also some variables are inherited regardless (e.g. DISPLAY, TERM), and some useful ones (e.g. HOME) are initialized by sudo, but I can't tell where that's done.

[1]: https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/blob/ef52db46f9b375d7ff...

Side note that I've always found interesting: sudo is almost entirely maintained by one dude: https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/graphs/contributors

The n=2 case also occurs in the commit: https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/commit/7873f8334c8d3103...

And indeed, the two values ate bitwise complements.

One feature they didn't mention they left out was the ability to run `make me a sandwich` (https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/blob/main/Makefile.in#L...)

It's (kind of) back - https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/commit/9757d29a24ac1872872cf09757b0439c54089707

└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

As a comparison, this is the output for https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo:

       0.0439 secs

Complete list (can be found here, files ins_*.h):

Fun fact, the “incident will be reported” message was close to being removed from sudo recently: https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/commit/6aa320c96a37613663e8de4c275bd6c490466b01