🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct27.223713.28506@cs.sandia.gov> wllarso@sandia.gov (William L Larson) writes:

> In article <719877662snx@Nemesys.demon.co.uk> gvm@nemesys.demon.co.uk (Granville Moore) writes:
> >
> >You don't have to share the root password in order to allow more
> >than one person to "su root" or login as root.  All you need are multiple
> >/etc/passwd entries with uid 0.  Their activities will be indistinguishable,
> >once they've su'd or logged in, but this would be the case with shared
> >passwords anyway.
> >
> 
> From my experience, I have kepts the GID of these "additional" root
> accounts to be the same as their individual GIDs.  This way, they can
> act as root all they want/need, but the files they modify will be tagged
> with their GID so that I can track who did what.  Not perfect, but
> better than nothing.

An interesting idea, but the information that you get (the GID field) has
to be regarded as "low-integrity" information, and so doesn't give you true
accountability.  It would be quite straightforward for any of the pseudo-root
users to modify /etc/passwd, change their GID field, do whatever they
want to, and then change the GID field back again.  Hopefully (?), anyone
to whom you're giving your root password and then letting loose on your
system will have a reasonable amount of Unix knowledge, and stands a pretty
good chance of realising that they can do this.  It is, of course,
a useful technique if you just want to know who to go and talk to about
some unexpected change that you've just found, (and might foil one or two
naive would-be-crackers) and so is probably worth doing.  The important
thing is to realise the limits of the technique, and not to allow a
false sense of security to develop.

Regards,

Granville






Granville Moore                                  gvm@Nemesys.demon.co.uk