"PS" == Paul Smith phhs80@gmail.com writes:
PS> I have noticed that from SLAX liveCD, one has total and PS> free access to the home partition of all Linux (Fedora) accounts PS> in the hard-disk of the computer.
If you can boot a machine with the media of your choice and that machine doesn't require some soft of external input to access encrypted data then you have free run of it. It doesn't really matter what OS you're running on it. They could just as well pull out the hard drive and access it at their leisure. If they have physical access to a machine, they can do what they will. There's nothing special about the SLAX CD or even Linux that allows this.
PS> In this way, with a SLAX disk, everyone can spy all accounts in PS> the hard-disk. How can this be prevented?
The basic measure is to password protect the BIOS and disable booting from anything but the hard drive. It is theoretically possible to encrypt all of the drives and then either require user input or the presence of some external device like a USB fob containing encryption keys. Perhaps there's a more paranoid Linux distro out there which supports this.
- J<