[Mageia-dev] bug, omission or feature

[Buchan Milne]

On Sunday, 3 June 2012 17:52:47 Colin Guthrie wrote:
> On the whole, this kind of "security" is basically bullshit anyway.

You can't make that assessment without understanding the rest of the security 
environment.

> It
> might make things a tiny bit harder, but if you can get into the
> bootloader to append a 1 on the command line,

Maybe you *can't* append anything you like to the command-line. Maybe the 
bootloader configuration has a 'boot single' option, which should require 
entry of the root password to access the system.

> you can also append
> init=/bin/bash too which totally bypasses everything too.

Not if the bootloader configuration is password protected (IOW, you can boot 
any configured option, but if you want to modify anything, you need to provide 
a password, different from the root password).

> So while it's
> maybe a nice idea, for all practical purposes, it's not any kind of real
> security anyway, so don't rely on it!

No security implementation relies on a single control being in place. A numebr 
of modern security best practices have thousands of controls, and the 
requirement for a password to be entered to boot single is almost always one 
of them, and a requirement for a bootloader password is usually another.

Regards,
Buchan
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