🚀 go-pugleaf

lemson@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (David Lemson) writes:
> jiro@shaman.com (Jiro Nakamura) writes:
> 
> >Presumably the school account files will be on a file server, not on the
> >local disk. And presumably the system administrator has half a brain and
> >did not set NFS to give root privileges globally to any machine that
> >asks for them.
> 
> >So even if Mr. or Ms. hacker does boot up a machine in root, they cannot
> >wreak much of any havok since they will not be root to the NFS server.
> 
> Well, anyone who knows NFS and its crappy security knows that once
> someone is root on the clients, they can simply su to any user and
> act like that other user, having full access to that other user's
> files.  Of course, they cannot delete en masse like they could if
> the filesystems were exported root.

If the administrator has more than half a brain (and a few extra bucks to  
spend), they would be going for AFS instead of NFS.  Considerably better  
security.  You don't have to really care if anyone breaks root (other than  
they can hose up the files on that one machine), unless of course you're  
stupid enough to leave some AFS passwords lying around on the local hard  
disk...

--
Garance Alistair Drosehn     =     gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu
ITS Systems Programmer            (handles NeXT-type mail)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute;           Troy NY    USA