Re: root password forgotten

[Dave Sherohman <esper@sherohman.org>]

On Sat, Jan 26, 2002 at 05:04:45AM +0100, Andreas Leitner wrote:
> On every standard Debian install, anybody can gain the root password
> within minutes (given the attacker has phyiscal access to the box):

As others have said, if an attacker has unrestricted physical access
to the machine, he has already won.  Period.

> 1) Issue "linux init=/bin/sh" on the lilo promt
> 2) Use john to crack the root password
> 
> Should be pretty transparent and thus hard to trace...

Neither john nor any other brute-force tool is likely to find any of
my root passwords in a reasonable amount of time, if ever.  Now, an
attacker could certainly edit /etc/shadow to reset the root password,
but that's pretty easily detectable.

-- 
When we reduce our own liberties to stop terrorism, the terrorists
have already won. - reverius

Innocence is no protection when governments go bad. - Tom Swiss