• Gaining root access easily from recovery menu from GRUB

    From Krunalkumar Shah@21:1/5 to All on Tue Jun 12 01:38:03 2018
    Hello everyone,

    I'm Krunalkumar Shah, student of master's degree in computer engineering specialization in Information Technology, I want to discuss with you experts about one confusing thing on Linux based systems.

    What problem that I'm facing is that anyone can get root access just by using the GRUB menu and especially from recovery mode.
    Initially, when the recovery mode starts it's in read only mode. but if we mount it read/write then one can not only see the internal files but also can modify it. not only that, he/she can also change passwords and system settings from that access.

    when i tried searching it over the internet, some people says it as feature while some considers it a bug. According to me, It's feature to repair system from failures, but it allows anyone to gain easy access to root, that's bug or problem. (They said
    that gaining physical access is root access!!!)

    I know that linux developers have provided so many ways to prevent this and one useful way is to encrypt the hard drive. But, It's time consuming and every time when the boots, you'll need to enter the decryption key.

    The main issue of gaining root occur just because many of the modern distribution of Linux does not allows to set root password for some reasons. and this allows anyone to go to grub, open recovery menu and then set the root password after mounting
    system into read/write mode.

    As a expert, I'm asking you all, what do you think, is it really problematic thing?

    By using Live system, It's true that we can get the data from disk. LUKS prevents this but it's time consuming. some distributions provides the encryption of the contents from home directory only, that's good. It prevents the user from accessing the
    content from live mode. but using live mode, by changing some configurations one can breaks this also....

    So, can we say linux as a secure system? for servers, we have to locked up servers into server rooms with high security... but what if one gains physical access!?


    I am going to develop some sort of mechanisms to prevent this from happening and prevents live mode to change the configurations and access from data, as my dissertation.

    I hope, you all can understand what i am trying to explain and my only aim is to make linux based system much stronger than anyone. Please feel free to ask about this, and If anyone wants to give suggestions about above issues and regarding my
    dissertation, I am really thankful to him/her.

    Thanks in advance with the hope that among this big community of Open Source, there are many people who will guide me.

    Thanks and have a good day...


    Regards,
    Krunalkumar Shah

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