Destroying "only" your home directory (was Re: Newbie question on permissions)
Derek Broughton
news at pointerstop.ca
Sun Apr 2 17:38:05 UTC 2006
Matthew R. Dempsky wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 01, 2006 at 09:51:28PM +0100, Daniel Carrera wrote:
>> If someone writes a Linux virus (difficult) and you open it with an app
>> running as root, or run it from a root terminal, it could destroy your
>> entire system. Otherwise, the most it can destroy is your home.
>
> This is something that has always bugged me: privelege separation
> between root and users is primarily desirable for system administrators
> of multi-user machines, not single-user machines.
>
> The system files on my laptop aren't of that much importance to me.
> Sure, it's an inconvenience to replace them, but that's no more
> difficult than installing in the first place.
>
> The files in my $HOME directory are precisely the ones I'm most
> concerned about losing due to malice.
I do understand your point - there's a few files in /etc I'd miss, and my
mail spool, but everything else outside /home is pretty well static - but
you're really arguing in the wrong direction. There's not much you _can_
do to prevent yourself from deleting your own files, but at least you don't
need to delete all the system files too.
--
derek
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