Question: Is it safe to execute a compiled dart program as root

[Felix Barz]

Hi. First of all, I am unsure if this is the right place to ask this question. If I should move it somewhere else, feel free to tell me.

Now to the topic itself. I am planning on building a small dart application that should run on a linux machine as the root user. My question here is: Is this safe to do, or are there some caveats one should be aware of before doing this.

For context: I am planning on deploying the application as precompiled dart "exe" without debugging information.

[Slava Egorov]

You need to define your threat model and give us at least some details on what your program does before we can give any meaningful answer. 

Without knowing more the best I could personally say is that running a Dart program under root is as safe as running a C program under root.  

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[Brett Sutton]

Yes it's fine. I do it every day.

 It however is not safe to run a non compiled program, the problems are many.

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[Felix Barz]

Yeah, I was asking about the language itself, as there are frameworks out there that explicitly warn against beeing used in a root environment. But if the dart language itself is fine (which I already thought it is, just wanted to make sure), thats fine. I am planning on writing a small wrapper around zfs to be exposed via SSH to limit the possible interactions with zfs to the bare minimum needed for my use case.

[Felix Barz]

Thats good news. I am aware that running any application as root is inherently dangerous at some level, but my question was aiming at the dart language itself, as there are Frameworks and Libraries out there that explicitly warn against beeing used in a root environment. I was not expecting dart to be problematic, but I wanted to make sure.

I also am aware that having non compiled script is problematic, but I won't do that.