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Re: Embarrassing security bug in systemd



On 12/09/2017 08:23 AM, David Wright wrote:
On Fri 08 Dec 2017 at 18:30:08 (-0800), Jimmy Johnson wrote:
On 12/07/2017 02:31 AM, Jonathan Dowland wrote:
On Thu, Dec 07, 2017 at 10:02:56AM +0000, Tixy wrote:
I'm running Jessie (with systemd running but booting with sysvinit) and
trying to execute halt/poweroff/reboot/shutdown from a terminal without
root privileges gives an error saying I must be superuser. Which has
always been my experience in 10 years of using Debian.

Be careful to double check what you are testing: in your situation it's
not clear whether /sbin/reboot is a symlink to systemctl (part of
systemd, so I would expect this not to work if you were not running
systemd as the init system) or a separate binary.


Jonathan, I started thinking about lost work where someone restarted
the computer while I was away from it and thought what if you can
lock-screen and lock access to console at the same time.  Is that
something that could be done? Helpful?

I know someone can pull the cord or press the power button, I got past that.

I use vlock -a in a VC to lock all the consoles. I've been using
it for years so I hadn't noticed the -n switch that allows you to
run it in X (with switching to a VC first).

You can still ssh into, and scp to, the machine while it's locked.
AFAICT Debian's versions allow unlocking with the root password as
well as the user's, which is handy if you forget which username
you were logged in under when you vlock'd it.

     https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2017/11/msg00951.html

Thanks David, works great, KDE runs on VC7 I went to VC2 an ran '$ vlock -a' and I was NOT able to switch to any other VC it was locked with the message to press enter with passwd, if you press enter with wrong passwd or no passwd you will be prompted for ROOT passwd. For me that was no problem, but I can see the shock on someones face when they don't know the root passwd and I got a chuckle out of that. After entering the root passwd I was able to switch back to VC7 and all was well. :)

Cheers!
--
Jimmy Johnson

Debian Buster - KDE Plasma 5.10.5 - AMD A8-7600 - EXT4 at sda7
Registered Linux User #380263


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