3 ms·
That an attacker has physical access does mean that your computer is compromised, so you're half right. If you seriously think having an account on a machine i
by jessedhillon 15y ago
That an attacker has physical access does mean that your computer is compromised, so you're half right.
If you seriously think having an account on a machine is as good as having the root account, then you should call up every shared hosting provider and let them know. They hand out accounts to any asshole with $10.
- owenmarshall 15y agoI haven't used shared hosting providers in years... but when I did, very few of them allowed shell access, and for very good reason. Even a properly secured system can be vulnerable to known and unknown privilege escalation bugs.
- js2 15y agojballanc didn't say you can't guard against privilege escalation. He said, assume you can't. The point is subtle but important: given limited resources, you should allocate the majority of them to keeping the hacker off your system in the first place. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to compare and contrast the entirely different use cases between a shared hosting server and a desktop machine running OS X.
- dlikhten 15y agoI can create an account on the machine without having root access. Which gives me a shell. Which means I can exploit a flaw to change root password. Which means I have access to cookies and other fun things. Which means I can probably access that person's gmail which is pretty much game over, man. Bedroom analogy is wrong. The computer is the castle. They have it. The problem is that your lord knows the secret entrance to your main castle (in the cloud). You want one of two things to happen: Keep the lord safe, or kill the lord so his secrets are gone with him. The attacker formatting the machine, or replacing the hard drive is fine, he already physically has it, just like he can take the vault and throw it outside and make a new one. However you don't want him accessing that vault.