On Thursday 13 September 2001 09:09 am, Jethro Cramp wrote:
On Thursday 13 September 2001 16:36, James Ogley wrote:
If you have physical access to the machine, and can boot from a floppy, get yourself a copy of Tom's Root Boot (www.toms.net/rb/home.html) - every Sys Admin should have one of these to hand anyway.
Amen to that.
Boot with this, and mount the root partition of the box (eg as /mnt)
vi /mnt/etc/shadow
<snip>
I've used this method a couple of times when I've forgotten my own password (serves me right for trying to be secure and using too long/complicated passwords). If you can get physical access to a Linux box then it is at maximum a couple of minutes work to by pass root access.
How does NT / Windows 2000 compare in this respect? Is it just as easy to walk up with a bootable floppy and change the password?
It would be nice to know that if nothing else Linux is no less secure than Windows in this respect.
Jethro
The main reason that I am using SuSE 7.2 Pro is because of the crypto filesystem. I have the /home, /usr and /mnt/storage directories encrypted with twofish. It's true that you can gain root if you have physical access to my machine, but the data... well... you won't have access to that. So in effect, if you have physical access to my machine, what you really have access to is 25% of a SuSE 7.2 installation. Good for you. Better for me ;^) Have a great day! -Steven -- -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+- Steven Hatfield http://www.knightswood.net Registered Linux User #220336 ICQ: 7314105 Useless Machine Data: Running SuSE Linux 7.2 Professional and KDE2.2 11:37am up 2 days, 15:17, 1 user, load average: 0.18, 0.11, 0.05 -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+- Random Quote: C, n.: A programming language that is sort of like Pascal except more like assembly except that it isn't very much like either one, or anything else. It is either the best language available to the art today, or it isn't. -- Ray Simard