ssh -l root getting context staff_t is pointless

Alexandre Oliva aoliva at redhat.com
Mon Apr 5 17:59:36 UTC 2004


On Apr  5, 2004, Stephen Smalley <sds at epoch.ncsc.mil> wrote:

> On Sun, 2004-04-04 at 03:05, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
>> I read previous discussions about it here.  The argument IIRC is that
>> making the default context staff_t adds a little bit of security.
>> 
>> IMHO, it adds no security whatsoever, since
>> `ssh -l root hostname -t su -' gets you to sysadm_r without asking for
>> a password.

> Do you have unlimitedUsers enabled in policy/tunable.te?  That might
> explain it.  Otherwise, the su should require re-authentication, as
> staff_t isn't normally authorized to skip authentication for pam_rootok.

Nope, I just happened to have setenforce 0, in which case su - doesn't
require a password.  I was hoping the message wouldn't make it through
moderation, since I had this `doh!' moment right after posting it :-/

-- 
Alexandre Oliva             http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}



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