On Tue, Jun 19, 2007 at 02:23:18PM +0930, n0dalus wrote:
Giving some users sudo access by default can easily make things less
secure. It means that accessing root becomes as easy as finding a
standard users' password. If there is some exploit successfully
executed on the user's account, I estimate chances are very high that
they can find the account's password saved in either the browser or
desktop environment settings and quickly gain root access.
If they can compromise the user account of a system administrator who ever
uses su or one of the usermode-enabled applications, the root password is
very quickly suspect. This is largely a false sense of security.
While some people take the effort to use a different root password
and
keep it separate from other passwords, very few people separate their
user account password from the myriad of other authentications, and
they shouldn't have to. It's reasonable and sensible that people reuse
their more trivial passwords, and for them to save their commonly used
passwords in commonly used applications.
Yes, well, a system administrator enabled password isn't one of those
trivial passwords. I agree with your point about myriads of passwords, but
it's vital to recognize which ones are actually important. I'm not sure
encouraging horrible password practice should be a design goal.
To my recollection, these are said advantages of sudo: (I will
discuss
them and ways of implementing them without needing regular users to be
in sudoers directly)
1) Don't have to repeat password as often
For people who want this feature, it is better written as a pam module
instead, which would allow it to be used for su, sudo and any other
access mechanisms (very extensible).
Exists already.
[...]
The usual way this is done is by having separate user accounts (one
for each person that needs root access) which are meant to exclusively
be used for doing privilege escalation. So people have a separate
account for their day-to-day work and their web browsing and document
writing, and su in to the special account to use sudo from there.
This seems unrealistic.
--
Matthew Miller mattdm(a)mattdm.org <
http://mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux ------> <
http://linux.bu.edu/>