Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4344 mails)

[Jos van Kan <vankan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

James Knott wrote:
> Jos van Kan wrote:

> > I fail to see what this has got to do with security. It completely
> > defeats the group idea to give every user its own group. But if you want
> > to keep everyone out of your files and directories nothing stops you
> > from chmod'ing the lot to y00, y=0..7
>
>
> The security problem is that:
>
> a) Every user is a member of users
> b) In the default install, every member of the groug users has access to
> the home directory of every other user.
Yes. But that has nothing to do with security. Only if you *allow* 
rights to the group "users" that group has reading rights. That the 
default setup allows the group *reading* rights to your documents is 
just what the group idea is all about. This has nothing to do with 
security. Nothing prevents you from creating a directory

mkdir very_secret_and_personal_documents
chmod 700 very_secret_and_personal_documents

and no one will be able to even enter that directory.
And nothing prevents you from doing
chmod -R go -rwx *
to disallow all rights to all files and directories except to the user 
himself.

Regards,
--
Jos van Kan                www.josvankan.tk