19 Jan
2023
19 Jan
'23
2:34 a.m.
On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 08:38:40AM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
Someone once told me that if they had physical access
to a Unix box, they
would get root. That has been true forever and it's even more true today,
pull the root disk, mount it on Linux, drop your ssh keys in there or add
a no password root or setuid a shell, whatever, if you can put your hands
on it, you can get in.
Until a few years ago, I would definitely agree. Done that regularly
in the past. (and worked on lots of network gear too...)
However..
Nowadays with a little effort you can make a bootable Linux machine that
uses either a passphrase or some external key/dongle/fingerprint/etc.
to unlock an encrypted root fs and additional filesystems.
If you don't have those credentials, then it's going to be pretty tricky to
access as you simply can't even access any of the encrypted filesystems to
start with.
Yes, you could probably get the initrd booted with a root shell and
then wipe the machine/disk to then do what you want, but the original
install is getting pretty hard to jump into with boot tricks these days.
Bye, Arno.