Disable Root Recovery

[tfreeman at intel.digichem.net]

On Tue, 14 Mar 2006, Feris Thia wrote:

> Hi All,
> 
> I've heard that root access can be recovered if we forget the password
> or something causes authentication failed. How is that done ?
> 
> And if so... I want it to be completely unrecoverable.. How can I do that ?
<<snip>>

I haven't seen a response to this, so I'll take a crack at it and hope 
that somebody will chime in when I err.

First off, please be reminded that everything here has exceptions _if_ 
somebody has the time and money to make the exception, especially if they 
physically have the hardware. Should you want to make a computer resistant 
to a TLA (Three Letter Agency - ie. US agencies like the CIA, FBA and so 
forth, your region of the world probably has similar organizations with 
the capabilities), you are almost completely out of luck.

Ok. Recovering root. Boot the computer to single user, and many 
configurations will give you the root prompt, from where you can 
reestablish a root password. 

If that has been forseen, boot the system with another disk (floppy, 
cd/dvd and so forth) into single user. If the bios blocks you with a 
password protected boot sequence, usually you can short out the bios for a 
second and reset the defaults.

Of course, there are further fall back positions from there, but I don't 
know most of them I'm sure, and most people don't protect their systems 
much harder in my experience.

If you are _sure_ you want to have a highly resistant system, you need to 
look into encrypted file systems and such, and somebody else will have to 
point you in the correct direction for those. I don't use them.


-- 
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