SU vulnerability
Ben Stringer
ben at burbong.com
Fri Dec 9 09:13:42 UTC 2005
On Fri, 2005-12-09 at 11:59 +0500, Sergey wrote:
> Long time ago I decided to protect my system by allowing *ONLY* users in wheel
> group to su to root. This allows to protect the system. Regardless where you
> know the root password or not - you can not su as long as system
> administrator does not put you into wheel group.
>
> As I know this is the default behaviour of FreeBSD.
>
> In redhat you do it by uncommenting line in /etc/pam.d/su
>
> # Uncomment the following line to require a user to be in the "wheel" group.
> auth required /lib/security/$ISA/pam_wheel.so use_uid
>
> This protects both su and kdesu.
>
> What do you think? This is useless - it does not protect the system at all, as
> I've thought for a long time.
>
> System-config-users utility - a little program to manage users has *NOTHING*,
> not even a little mention anywhere, that it breaks the security.
>
So, add the same line to /etc/pam.d/system-config-users
Otherwise, all you have done is to change the handling of security for
the "su" executable, nothing else.
Cheers, Ben
More information about the users
mailing list