This of course is trivial for an attacker to circumvent, the RPM database is not really protected at all.
That's why it may be an excellent idea to back up the rpm data base on floppy...
*grin* /var/lib/rpm: total 60752 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 22 23:50 . drwxr-xr-x 35 root root 4096 Dec 7 00:04 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 16384 Dec 7 02:00 conflictsindex.rpm -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 12976128 Dec 7 02:00 fileindex.rpm -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 32768 Dec 7 02:00 groupindex.rpm -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 49152 Dec 7 02:00 nameindex.rpm -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 29051784 Dec 7 02:00 packages.rpm -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 86016 Dec 7 02:00 providesindex.rpm -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 19890176 Dec 7 02:00 requiredby.rpm -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 16384 Dec 7 02:00 triggerindex.rpm rpm -qa|wc -l 1205 Hint: `rpm --rebuilddb´ reduces the size drastically, sometimes...
... together with the rpm binary (which is statically linked as well for other reasons).
While you're at it, storing md5 sums of at least all the files shown by rpm -qal and all files in /etc is a very good idea too.
Volker
Thanks,
Roman.
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| Roman Drahtmüller