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Comment by tok1

18 hours ago

> Instead, its documented approach to running as some other account is to add some of the superuser's privileges to Kea [...]

Not disagreeing, just want to mention that Kea can run fine without privileges, which is also documented at the link provided. Key is to use DHCP relaying, a technique which becomes relevant quickly in larger setups anyways because you cannot (or don't want to) give the DHCP server access to all subnets: Instead of the DHCP server(s) processing local requests, DHCP relaying agents encapsulate and unicast-forward the whole DHCP request-response traffic to centralized DHCP instance(s). Those relaying agents (on switches/routers) do require privileges but potentially posing a smaller attack surface due to being much simpler. Sadly, ISC has not made a successor dhcprelay as part of Kea, but luckily systemd-networkd implements the RelayTarget parameter, adding this capability (at least for IPv4).