default username admin cannot be changed

[inuonly]

Option to change admin username from admin to custom user defined string.

Description:
There is no option to change admin user account, by default it uses admin and is not editable. This is not secure considering we are dealing with cameras as admin is the common way to exploit any system. If we can make it to be renamed to something else, this could be better than having just admin.

How to reproduce :
We are using docker version of motioneye to setup our instance with ccrisan/motioneye:master-amd64 as image as instruction in documentation page.

Expected behaviour:
If there can be a environment variable or config added to change admin, that would be neat to deal with this situation.

Hope this helps. Good Luck!

[MichaIng]

The same would be great for the surveillance user. Both usernames are already variables across vast parts of the code base, in frontend as well as in the backend. Only the UI fields are read-only, and I am sure there are quite some parts in the code where the fixed usernames are expected.

But it should not be too hard to find and adjust those.

[Marijn0]

The surveillance username can already be changed. I searched through the codebase but I have yet to find a reason why the admin username couldn’t be made editable as well.

I did a quick test using the browser dev tools by removing the readonly attribute from the admin username field and entering a different username. That worked fine for me, and so far I haven’t encountered any issues, except when using special characters in the username, which caused me to get locked out.

[Marijn0]

I have found some more information on this. The change that made the admin username field read-only was introduced in this commit.

This comment provides more context for that change:
#250 (comment)

This works (and used to work this way) but when you'll try to log in using SSH, FTP or SMB, you'll see that your new admin user won't work. This is because it's difficult to update the username for all these services.

If I understand this correctly, the issue was that the SSH, FTP, or SMB username did not stay in sync with the username selected in the web GUI. However, SSH, FTP, or SMB services are only provided by motionEyeOS, correct? If so, this may no longer be relevant for motionEye.

[MichaIng]

Nice find. SMB as storage endpoint works when running motionEye as root user. Great would be to support it as well via sudo or adding the motion user to certain groups to give it permissions: #2710

But in this case, it is about accessing the host system via SSH, FTP, or SMB, and that is and should be of course totally independent of motionEye. If it is seen a source of confusion in motionEyeOS, when motionEye UI and POSIX admin users differ, then this is something which can be patched in motionEyeOS, but should not limit the possibilities of plain motionEye.

[Marijn0]

That makes sense, thanks for the clarification.
Since I have not found any other reason why the field is currently read-only (please point me to the relevant code if you have found something). I’m happy to open a PR to make the admin username field editable in the UI and maybe also add a basic sanity check (e.g. to prevent issues with special characters).

[MichaIng]

Let me deal with your (and others') open PRs first. It looks like we get some forces the next weeks for smaller/well defined PRs 😉.

[Marijn0]

Just came across this: #2256
If someone is working on this issue, they may want to look at this when we make the username editable for security reasons, as it can be read before logging in. 😅

[MichaIng]

I just opened a PR. Let me review the concern.