stcanard said:
Surely you're not that silly. You've got to be making this up to make a point.
I'm not making this up, don't know why I should. There's no sensitive data on that computer and I'm educated well enough to know the risks.
If you would prefer to set about setting up an insecure telnet or ftp server on your mac, rather than just checking the "Remote Login" box under sharing and using the incredibly secure ssh/scp/sftp (for which there are free clients for every platform), then, well, honestly I am at a loss for words.
1) Many people do this. It's not widely known how sftp works, so they just check the FTP box. "loss for words"... get real.
2) There are only sucky clients on the platform unless you want to spend some money.
3) Also, sftp is a laughable concept. Now, if there was an auth-tls ssl FTP server bundled with OS X and free and good clients were available I could understand your reaction.
If the person is security challenged enought that they are logging in via plaintext, and using the same password for their login account and email, do you really think they will use a different password for root?
It seems you have no idea. People even use the same password on ebay and other web services, often transmitted in plaintext too. As for your question, you can enforce different passwords. Also, you can tell those people that it is extremely important that they don't use this password for anything else (play some sounds, flash the screen etc. when they enter the root pw, things people know from movies).
It's a false security -- it gives no security benefit
Of course it does, you don't log in with a root password (by which I mean a password that allows root login).
, but adds an extra difficutly for the novice users.
Why? It adds just enough difficulty to provide real security.
For the advanced user, if you really do believe it is safer nobody is stopping you from disabling sudo access and enabling root.
I'm not talking about the really advanced users. I'm talking about novices and about lazy people and about people like you who think logging in using a root password is good (even if they use ssh).
If the person is so dedicated to trying to crack your box that they are sniffing the network trying to steal a password, 99% of the computer world has lost already through inexperience. I would put to you that this is a very unusual situation.
Sniffing the connection is unusual? The tools are so easy to use, the average comp mag buyer has used them several times.
There's a continuum to watch -- the more secure a system, the more inconvenient it is, and so the less likely people are to use it. A balance needs to be struck and this is what Apple has done.
Yes, Apple has done something like that. But that doesn't mean sudo is better than a separate root login security-wise, which is the contention here, because it clearly is not.
As for sudo being more secure because you have to think about what you're doing... personally, I think this idea is completely overrated. How many times have you been saved by sudo? In my experience, I mostly run into those errors because I just forgot to enter sudo, not because I do something that normally wouldn't require root privilegies but now does in this very special case I haven't thought about (like being in the wrong directory and typing rm -rf *). So, the normal reaction to the error is: cursor_up ctl-a sudo enter. And a wrong sudo call ****s up the system just as bad.
So, again, in my opinion sudo should be disabled (at least for login users) and to give the novice and others an additional level of security, rm could be overriden to move files to the trash or a different directory which is cleared once every hour or so (I and many others are currently doing this anyway).
