Re: [SOLVED] Re: Security hole in LXDE?
On Mon, 6 Mar 2017 19:36:40 +0000
Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> wrote:
> On Mon 06 Mar 2017 at 18:59:18 +0000, Joe wrote:
>
> > On Mon, 6 Mar 2017 13:40:45 -0500
> > Greg Wooledge <wooledg@eeg.ccf.org> wrote:
> >
> > > On Mon, Mar 06, 2017 at 06:31:46PM +0000, Joe wrote:
> > > > Debian appears to use the group 'sudo' as an administrative
> > > > group, where some other distributions use 'wheel'.
> > > >
> > > > I would not have thought that users would be added to it by
> > > > default, there are no members on my sid/xfce4 workstation.
> > > > Indeed, up to Jessie, sudo was not installed at all by default,
> > > > and may still not be.
> > >
> > > If you use the regular Debian installer, the user account that you
> > > create during installation gets added to a lot of these special
> > > groups (sudo, cdrom, floppy, audio, video, ...?). Users that you
> > > create post-installtion using adduser or useradd do not.
> > >
> >
> > New behaviour, then, my current sid was installed as wheezy, I added
> > sudo manually early on, but as it was not installed by default, it
> > would not have added the installing user to a sudo group. I'm
> > certainly not a member of that group, and have no wish to be.
>
> The "first user" is not in the sudo group. The place to check this
> is the templates file in the user-setup-udeb package.
>
> > Possibly I'm missing something, but doesn't this repeat the Windows
> > mistake of automatically giving the user admin privileges? Isn't
> > that the main reason for the existence of so many Windows viruses?
>
> Look at it this way. The "first user" wishes to set up a printer. Is
> it better for the user to be granted very limited privileges by being
> in the lpadmin group or to become root to carry out the task?
>
Who said anything about lpadmin? The question is about the wisdom of
automatically including someone in the sudo group, which in a default
Debian sudoers file, gives full root privileges to everything, using the
user's password.
We have someone saying this happens, someone else saying it doesn't, I
don't know as I haven't done a recent installation, and the thread was
started by someone who says it did happen to him.
--
Joe
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