On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 4:35 PM Kevin Fenzi <kevin(a)scrye.com> wrote:
On 5/17/19 5:23 AM, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
...snip...
> 3) Force Anaconda to require the creation of a non-root user that is a
> member of the `wheel` group, so that this user can be used to SSH in
> and administer the system. Essentially, remove the root user creation
> spoke as an option from the interactive install.
So, this is basically the old cloud-init makes a user that can sudo to
root thing. Can anyone explain in small words how this is more secure?
This is not "force Anaconda to create a specific user", it's "the
interactive dialog won't complete the installation without you
selecting a non-root administrative user of your choice".
It's more secure in that a non-well-known username is less prone to
being vulnerable to automated attacks.
I mean, in this case the attacker would need to guess the username
in
addition to the password (where in the cloud cause this is known), but
otherwise why not just keep root password access ?
Guessing the username is *hard*. It's not something an average script
will do. It protects against casual attacks. Yes, it isn't necessarily
helping against targeted attacks, but those are an entirely different
ball of wax.
> I always found that cloud default anoying and useless and haven't yet
> seen a good argument to not do it.
>