Re: "Small" Bugg
well, i'm loving this thread so i'm gonna put my piece in.
i too think the login shell is useless. i don't see it being required by the
majority of users, and i do see it being a security problem.
no matter how u look at it, allowing a non user access to information on the
system gives them more to go by if they wanted to break in. information is
given to them way too freely and it gives them knowledge of the system setup.
knowledge is power. you simply don't want some jerk getting power to your system
simply because the means were there.
every little thing that you let the attacker know gives them that much more to
exploit. consider the example of an insecure software program being available on
the system. what's to stop any fool coming in, using the login shell to crash
the program, get root and do what they like? and what about the password issue
that keeps being raised? they can still get the password file. even if
encrypted, password files are still generally laughably crackable by any
script kiddie.
so i propose: leave the login shell in... but NOT by default. most people would
have little or no need for it at all and even if there's only a slight chance
it's a security flaw it should not be included by default because in the end,
most people who will be installing the hurd will not be security concious enough
to decide for themselves whether it's going to cause a problem in their
particular case. if someone really, really does need it, they can enable it, and
the procedure of enabling it should be documented to the user so that they
understand the possible consequences of enabling such a feature, even if it's
just a one line "may cause a security flaw".
don't compromise the power of gnu simply to "make things easy". that's a
microsoft trait.
from
da Bobstopper
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