This is actually how the public workstations in MIT computer clusters have always worked. The root password is public to anyone with a legit account, but access

This is actually how the public workstations in MIT computer clusters have always worked. The root password is public to anyone with a legit account, but access to it gets you almost nothing because all services including the network filesystem are kerberized, and machines are really good at wiping all local changes upon logout. Some more details here: https://www.quora.com/Are-computer-networks-in-MIT-harder-to-break-into-than-computer-networks-in-other-universities-simply-because-MIT-has-so-many-hackers https://www.quora.com/Are-computer-networks-in-MIT-harder-to...