Privileges and Permissions

When a user is logged into Cockpit, they are logged into a normal session that has exactly the same privileges as if they logged in via SSH or on the console.

In some cases Cockpit will try to escalate the privileges of the user using Policy Kit or sudo. If the user is able to escalate privileges from the command line, then Cockpit will use that same capability to perform certain privileged tasks. Cockpit can use the user's login password internally to escalate privileges unless the user has chosen to prevent that from happening.

To test out whether Cockpit can escalate privileges, you can run these commands from a the terminal built into Cockpit.

$ sudo cockpit-bridge
...
$ pkexec cockpit-bridge
...

If either of these commands succeed without prompting for a password, Cockpit will be able to start a privileged copy of the cockpit-bridge and use it to perform privileged tasks when necessary. When running these commands from the terminal built into Cockpit neither should prompt for a password.

Usually a user needs to be in the wheel Unix user group for the user to be able to escalate privileges in this way. However both Policy Kit and sudo may be configured to use other criteria.