What's so secure about sudo?

What's so secure about sudo?

Dotan Cohen dotancohen at gmail.com
Tue Jun 18 10:38:00 IDT 2019


One reason that I like sudo is that root can be disabled for all
intents and purposes. Most random SSH logins were once to the root
account. We hardly ever see that anymore, thanks in no small part to
the deprecation of root in many widespread Linux distros.

On Tue, Jun 18, 2019 at 9:24 AM Shlomo Solomon <shlomo.solomon at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This has bothered me for years and I decided to "get it off my chest".
>
> For many years I used su to do administrative tasks, but "everyone"
> uses sudo and the claim is that it's more secure than actually logging
> in as root.
>
> In principal, of course, root login is not a good thing, but let's
> remember something I've never seen discussed. I would assume that on
> most systems the root password is MUCH more secure than that of a
> regular user. Now if I give user david sudo privileges, anyone who
> cracks david's (weak) password now has access to root privileges.
>
> And before anyone says that this is only a one-time authorization, what
> if the guy who cracked david's password now does:
>        sudo passwd root
>
> So what's so secure about using sudo?
>
> --
> Shlomo Solomon
> http://the-solomons.net
> Claws Mail 3.16.0 - Kubuntu 18.04
>
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-- 
Dotan Cohen

http://gibberish.co.il
http://what-is-what.com



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