Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Andrew <afrayedknot AT thefrayedknot.armory.com>]

On Thu, Dec 02, 2004 at 08:54:28PM -0600, Chris Dombroski wrote:
> I guess I'm just confused then, because I would think that if a program was 
> run from a
> process owned by root that it would also have root priveledges without 
> having to be
> authenticated again.
> 

(apparently) Pam can be configured to make you know the root password
for things even though you are root, this is probably to make it harder
(but not by much) for people who have exploited your system to continue
the exploit and leave a back door via automated scripts. Although it
seems like a trivial task to just edit the /etc/pam.d files such that
it wont ask for a password, i guess most kiddies arent that smart :-)
You could probably also configure pam so that some users could do certain
things and others couldnt, and all sorts of other finer grained security
tasks.

-Andrew