*BSD News Article 79887


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From: j@ida.interface-business.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc
Subject: Re: Making booting secure
Date: 4 Oct 1996 09:52:02 GMT
Organization: interface business GmbH, Dresden
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colinj@math.math.unm.edu (Colin Eric Johnson) wrote:

> I'm upgrading about 30 machines to 2.1 and I need to make the boot
> process as secure as possible. They all sit in a "public" lab so any
> user who saw fit could power one off, restart the machine and then
> interrupt the init process to get a single user shell. 

Flag your console in /etc/ttys as `insecure'.  It will ask for a root
password then when booting single-user.

Of course, people could still `borrow' the hard disk over the
weekend... or boot a floppy, to get it single-user.  A physically
insecure machine isn't secure, even if it's logically secure.

-- 
J"org Wunsch					       Unix support engineer
joerg_wunsch@interface-business.de       http://www.interface-business.de/~j