root password

[Bernardo Innocenti]

Asheesh Laroia wrote:

> Can 'su' be replaced with a wrapper that runs 'sudo -s'?  That way, only 
> the olpc user can run sudo su, but activities can't get root.

"su" uses pam.  pam_wheel can check that you belong to the
group wheel (or any other group) before granting you access.


> We could also have a race through the wiki to replace mentions of 'su' 
> with the appropriate sudo call.

This is exactly why I think we should leave both ways
available for some time, along with the empty root password.


>> Even better, we could put
>>
>>  /sbin/mingetty --noclear --autologin root tty1
>>
>> in inittab to circumvent the issue altogether.
> 
> If the OLPC security team says that's fine, then it does help avoid 
> updating the documentation. (-:

I wrote the above along with Michael Stone, the author of
rainbow.  So I guess it's fine with him...

Our security is very unlike that of multiuser systems and
regular laptops.  We've never even tried to prevent
unauthorized access to your data from users at the
"console".

This is why user olpc logs in automatically at boot and root
has an empty password (or lets you sudo with no password
from user olpc).

It's been long known that passwords are not a very effective
protection from users who have physical access to the console.
Any half decent Linux user can login as root without knowing
the password if they can play with grub or boot from CD.

-- 
 \___/
 |___|   Bernardo Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
  \___\  One Laptop Per Child - http://www.laptop.org/