Re: root login
On Tue, Apr 29, 2003 at 11:33:53AM -0700, Michael Toomim wrote:
> If a hacker gets access to your account, and then you su to root, he'll
> sniff your password and get root access. Being a user who periodically
> logs in as root is just as insecure as being a user who logs in as root.
>
> Except that in this case, it's actually LESS secure. Say a hacker gets
> into my user account. If I were to login as root from GDM, the hacker
> would still be trapped in my user account. But if I *can't* log in as
> root from GDM, I'll be forced to su to root instead from my user
> account, and the hacker will get my password (and consequently root access).
This argument has the minor disadvantage of being completely wrong. If a
hacker gets access to your user account, then the system utilities or
kernel etc cannot have been changed to obtain your root password during
the normal utilisation of your system. Your /bin/su or whatever is still
owned by root and there's no way the hacker-as-a-user could modify it to
log or yield you root password. THIS IS THE POINT OF USING YOUR COMPUTER
AS A USER, AND HAVING ALL THIS STUFF OWNED BY ROOT! [1]
Take the other point of view. What if you use root like your normal user
account? The hacker gets access to this by the same means he gets access
to your user account before (probably idiocy in this case?) and not only
can he turn your HDD into a brick, destroy your data, he can also access
the user accounts of all the people on your system, and tap all their
passwords and keypresses for any other systems they use. Now which is
less secure?
Regards,
Rob
[1]: It also prevents the spread of trojan/virus programs between users
on a computer. root holds all the keys to the executables on the system,
and users usually only pass around data. Start doing trivia as root,
then you fuck the system up for everyone the moment one
gnome-lala-daemon listens on a TCP port by mistake and gets buffer
overflowed. Your arguments are completely untenable.
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