On Friday 05 September 2003 09:45, Clemens von Musil wrote: > Since I am quite new into Linux, I perhaps have a stupid question... > > I played with /etc/pam.d/system-auth last week and evidently disabled > all authentication methods... su didn't work and system login was > impossible. > > I booted from the RedHat CD and found myself loged in as root without > any given password and could repair the system.auth file. > My question are: > > - How is this possible? > - How works the described "CD-login" login? > - And ... is anyone, armed with a RedHat CD, able to open any Linux > system? You have booted a rescue CD that has been able to mount your root file system, and chrooted you into it. This does bypass the authentication processes. This is good/bad. If it didn't, you could effectively damage your authentication methods, and leave you locked out of your own system for good. Honestly, anybody that has physical access to your system, and is capable of booting from anything other than your harddrive has access to your system. If this is too insecure for you, A) set a bios password to keep people from changing boot options (still overrideable if the person has physical access to clear bios settings), and B) set a grub password to keep anybody from entering single user mode which also lets you into the system bypassing authentication methods. -- Jesse Keating RHCE MCSE http://geek.j2solutions.net Mondo DevTeam (http://www.microwerks.net/~hugo/) Was I helpful? Let others know: http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=jkeating -- Shrike-list mailing list Shrike-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/shrike-list
