On Wed, 24 Aug 2005, James Knott wrote:
Jos van Kan wrote:
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.
Why should group members have access to my files by default. If I want to stop them I have to change the permissions to my directory.
I feel that this is the crux of the situation. Consider it "secure by
default." If I recall properly, Debian could turn the per-user group
concept on and off such that when on new users automatically got new
groups of the same name and preferably UID==GID. It seems to me that
there is no way that SuSE 10.0 is going to be able to be modified to
make groups for each user when that user is created, but that is no
reason not to try to get that behavior changed for the future.
--
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Carp in denim - There's a fish in my pants!
Jon Nelson