The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.
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Re: Getting root on Linux

[ Should the CCs be trimmed? ]

One other thing I forgot to mention.

On RedHat Linux, you can also get root like this:

Linux 1
Linux emergency

Debian is protected against that by this entry in /etc/inittab:

# What to do in single-user mode.
~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin

Now on to Guy's message...

Guy Maor <maor@ece.utexas.edu> writes:

> > 3. Type: Linux init=/bin/bash
> 
> Use the password and restricted options in lilo.conf:
> 
>        password=password
>        restricted

Yes, I have found those also...  what bothers me, though, is that the
OS ships in an insecure state like this.  And there are cases where
you would want people to be able to specify kernel parameters
themselves but not gain root access.

I think that the kernel should have an compile-time option to enable
the "init=", and that such an option should be disabled by default.
This is a pretty big hole and it really surprised me when I saw it
this evening.

> Ensuring absolute security when people have physical access to the
> machine is next to impossible, but you can make things more difficult.
> Set the BIOS so that it boots from the hard drive before the floppy
> drive, and set the password protection on the BIOS.  Other things you
> might want to do are disconnect the reset switch, comment out the
> ctrlaltdel action in /etc/inittab, and lock the case.

That is, of course, true.  What we are doing is trying to prevent most
things.  We have already done everything you have suggested except
comment out Ctrl-Alt-Del (which is harmless and even useful in our
situation)...  We also have the computer physically locked down so
people cannot walk out with it.

> Presumably a lab proctor would notice if somebody took apart the
> computer to reset the bios or mount the hard drive from a laptop.

This is not possible in our situation since the case is padlocked
shut.  Unless they take tinsnips or hacksaw to it, I guess :-)

-- 
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