Arch Linux

Ben9250

Member

From: Bath - England

Registered: 2010-06-10

Posts: 208

Website

sudo su

It came to me that whilst it's safer and easier for me to use sudo for accessing things as root temporarily, someon wouldn't bother trying to get into my user, as root login from shell is disabled, only to try and guess another, more complicated password for su, when they could just do sudo su. So I blacklisted su and shell from my sudo. Having said that, other than those few things blacklisted, I have the ALL setting in visudo for me, mainly for conveinience because I am the only user and admin of this laptop. The beginners guide (certainly when I installed Arch) said to use the ALL option, but now I'm figuring, even with su blacklisted, I would be better of doing a whitelist of thing I often need as root, like pacman and emacs etc. I was going to put something about this blacklisting business in the wiki but after ponding su, and user, owner, and group permissions, I'm beginning to doubt the usefulness of sudo, especially for people who have the setup I do, i.e. it's their laptop, and no-one else uses it.

Just wondered what the opionion of fellows more learned in the security aspects of Linux than myself is.

Cheers,
Ben.

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"In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it."
  - H. G. Wells