Linux: FC-5/64 - Renaming su

[EmosOohay]

Linux: FC-5/64 - Renaming su

For security reasons can the command su be renamed without causing other automatic processes to fail?

I thought I would ask before I made the system unbootable.

Thanks,
Arn

 

[rmrf]

do you have /etc/suauth? i would try that.

 

[EmosOohay]

found sudo, but not sure it does the same thing

 

[kamper]

Renaming the command does not give you any added security.

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: kamper
Renaming the command does not give you any added security.

They do have to guess one more filename but it's kind of sleezy. You could probably just download an RPM of 'su' and run it, lol. Plus other apps are able to get you to a root terminal like sudo and gksudo/gksu. Just make the root password complex enough or else take the person out of sudoers if you don't want them using sudo.

Maybe if you tell us more background about your situation we can provide a better solution to improve your security.

 

[M00T]

Security through obscurity

 

[drag]

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linu...rity-guide/s1-wstation-privileges.html

There are several effective ways to to disable root access to your system. Renaming su to something obscure isn't one of them. 😉

The easiest way is going to be simply changing the root default shell to nologin. Just make sure that you have a user account setup to use sudo or something like that. The only way to realy back out of that would be to reboot into a rescue cdrom and edit /etc/passwd to give root a sh or bash shell.

Also you could just change permissions of su to. There are a lot of different things you could do.

 

[cleverhandle]

Whatever it is you're trying to accomplish, there are better ways to do it than this. In particular, note that su uses PAM, so you can define all kinds of limits there that will actually be enforced by the program rather than using cheesy obscurity methods.

 

[cleverhandle]

Originally posted by: xtknight
You could probably just download an RPM of 'su' and run it, lol.

No, you couldn't. Or rather, you could but it wouldn't work - su is setuid root, and a normal user cannot create such an executable.

 

[Nothinman]

For security reasons can the command su be renamed without causing other automatic processes to fail?

I thought I would ask before I made the system unbootable.

The system will boot, but renaming the 'su' command won't gain you anything either. That's like thinking "maybe if I move my front door to the side of my house no one will be able to figure out how to get in".

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
That's like thinking "maybe if I move my front door to the side of my house no one will be able to figure out how to get in".

Lol. Nice one 😛

 

[Nothinman]

I'm glad someone liked it =)