On 11-04-30 02:39 PM, Leslie S Satenstein wrote:
I understood that X was not designed with security in mind. I have this
question, given a small environment of 3-4 users, all of which are
locally attached.
Is my use of root, given these users are all local on the system with
Gnome, a risk if none of the users are hostile?
If someone logs into the system with remote desktop, (not happening
during the day), is he able to see all the keypresses, as outlined in
the link I was referred to in the previous emails?
If he/she has to be on the system, and go through the effort to capture
my Gnome keystrokes, then what is the danger of a breech from remote
logon (secure telnet via putty)? Just because a danger is possible from
a local user only, what is the risk to using root under Gnome? Is the
risk any less with Gnome3 or XFCE? The local user's are doing authoring
of material and may from time to time, access Google or other search engine.
I think it is easiest to say that elevating privileges is a better way
to do handle it. Give the program you want to run root privileges, not
the user.
If you make a shortcut (application starter) and just put sudo (or
gksudo) before the command it will pop up a password prompt and just
that process is running with root privileges.
A good trick as well is to use the sudoers file and specify programs
users should be allowed to run, and you can also specify that no
password is needed for certain users on certain programs.
There just is no good reason to run as root, since all it takes is a
sudo call to get there. Plus no need to log out and log in again as root
to do things.
I'll let someone else answer whether keystrokes can be captured and so on ;)
Jeremy
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