The root user now owns the whole MSYS2 installation and can run pacman. The
login path the journey depends on - the sshd, the login shell zsh and cat - is
kept as a protected copy in C:\msys2\opt\kik that only SYSTEM and the
administrators may write, and the sshd runs as SYSTEM from there (the new
KiK sshd task; the msys2-sshd service is disabled). Replacing the user's own
/usr/bin/sshd therefore cannot touch the running server.
opt/kik is two levels below C:\msys2, so its runtime resolves the same
installation root and the login shell and the user's tools share one cygwin
runtime. A separate second installation does not work: two runtimes in one
process tree corrupt each other's file descriptors and pacman cannot lock its
database.
/etc/passwd and /etc/ssh are read-only to the user, /opt/kik is first on PATH
so cat README survives even if the user deletes their own /usr/bin/cat, and
the restore task rebuilds the protected copy and re-applies the permissions
every 30 minutes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The user could empty the authorized_keys and break the login of the
website, change the shell configuration to break the prompt, and write
startup files that zsh reads on every login. The shell configuration and
the key are now read-only for the user, and the shell reads its
configuration from ~/.zsh, so the files in the home directory are
ignored.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The keys of the people who deploy are in the repository now: in home/ for
the root user and in admin/ for the Administrator. The resources mirror
both home directories, and the deploy script no longer reads any private
key.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Code <noreply@anthropic.com>
