https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=305525#c4
Benjamin Weber changed:
What |Removed |Added
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CC| |benji.weber@gmail.com
--- Comment #4 from Benjamin Weber 2007-08-28 13:06:36 MST ---
What you propose is as ubuntu does things, this is significantly less secure.
It means
- Only one password (the one the user uses all the time) to be
compromised by an attacker or script to have complete control over the system.
- When combined with sudo's authentication caching it means that the
default user has full root priviledges.
- With only one password the same password is being used for two
different privlege levels, how is the user supposed to know whether an app can
damage their system or not. They have to authorise apps running as them, and
apps running that can damage the system with the same password. I think this
might be more confusing to the user than a separate user account.
This is significantly worse than windows where even the Administrator account
can't do as much damage as root can, and in new versions of windows
authentication priviledges are requested on demand on a per-priviledge basis,
not time based.
Also you are assuming that even on a desktop there is only one main user.
Currently we default to running as a non-privleged user, actions to be
performed as root can be authorised using the root password. What is the
problem with this?
If you mean simply disallowing logging into a desktop environment as root I
agree that it would be sensible to disable that.
Additionally it would be nice to see applications only running the code that
needs to be privileged as a more priviledged user. Currently there are some
situations where an entire application must be run as root. This is not good as
it means that the GUI may not fit into the user's desktop (if it's a different
theme) and The majority of the application does not need the full priviledges.
This is an application design issue though, and switching to sudo would not
affect this problem, if anything exacerbate it by encouraging people to run
applications with full system permissions regularly.
In summary things can be made much better, but the ubuntu way just makes things
worse both from a security & usability standpoint.
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