06-10-2016
Hi Herb,
I might be a bit old fashioned here, but it used to be part of the SA's job to ensure that no one other than the SA had access to the root account. It also used to be drummed into SA's that any application that had to be installed as root was basically flawed.
From a security perspective any such application was a likely candidate for an exploit, so should not be allowed. As to giving an external vendor root access, not going to happen on my watch - why?
A real example - I have had a black box system delivered from a major international telecommunications company, complete with two back door (UID 0:GID 1) accounts setup. Additionally in the applications directory there was a SUID file called xyzzy which turned out to be a copy of the /usr/bin/ksh binary.
I would trust no person outside the systems admin team, where the requirement was to have the root password - in some cases I wouldn't trust people in the team, but that was for a different reason.
Regards
Gull04
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LEARN ABOUT LINUX
k5login
.K5LOGIN(5) File Formats Manual .K5LOGIN(5)
NAME
.k5login - Kerberos V5 acl file for host access.
DESCRIPTION
The .k5login file, which resides in a user's home directory, contains a list of the Kerberos principals. Anyone with valid tickets for a
principal in the file is allowed host access with the UID of the user in whose home directory the file resides. One common use is to place
a .k5login file in root's home directory, thereby granting system administrators remote root access to the host via Kerberos.
EXAMPLES
Suppose the user "alice" had a .k5login file in her home directory containing the following line:
bob@FUBAR.ORG
This would allow "bob" to use any of the Kerberos network applications, such as telnet(1), rlogin(1), rsh(1), and rcp(1), to access alice's
account, using bob's Kerberos tickets.
Let us further suppose that "alice" is a system administrator. Alice and the other system administrators would have their principals in
root's .k5login file on each host:
alice@BLEEP.COM
joeadmin/root@BLEEP.COM
This would allow either system administrator to log in to these hosts using their Kerberos tickets instead of having to type the root pass-
word. Note that because "bob" retains the Kerberos tickets for his own principal, "bob@FUBAR.ORG", he would not have any of the privileges
that require alice's tickets, such as root access to any of the site's hosts, or the ability to change alice's password.
SEE ALSO
telnet(1), rlogin(1), rsh(1), rcp(1), ksu(1), telnetd(8), klogind(8)
.K5LOGIN(5)