Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Mon, 8 Feb 1999 15:25:41 +1100
From:      jonathan michaels <jon@caamora.com.au>
To:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Fw: HELP!!!!
Message-ID:  <19990208152541.C28384@caamora.com.au>
In-Reply-To: <199902072231.RAA01367@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com>; from Crist J. Clark on Sun, Feb 07, 1999 at 05:31:09PM -0500
References:  <36BE0A83.4D82D496@confusion.net> <199902072231.RAA01367@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Sun, Feb 07, 1999 at 05:31:09PM -0500, Crist J. Clark wrote:
> Laurence Berland wrote,
> > Is there a way to keep people from doing this who aren't supposed to? Like if I set up a BSD box in a library and someone knows how to do that, is there a way to stop them? (Or do I just put a password on the BIOS so they can't reboot fully?)
> 
> "There is no security without physical security."

no truer words were ever said.

> 
> See 'man 5 ttys' and 'more /etc/ttys' (if you still have the comments
> from the installed version) on how to prevent people from going into
> single-user mode without root's password. 
> 
> Even if you stop them from going into single-user mode from the HD disk
> boot, what stops them from slipping a floppy in the drive and booting
> off of that?

a twist on this solution ... i had a freiend in a similar position, not a 
library, worse, a busy it dept office in a big company.

what they ended up doing is removing teh floppy drive, replaced the an old 
adaptec 1542b with a newer adaptec 2940 adding a "laying in bottom drawer"
(c) scsi cdrom 2x and enabled boot from cdrom in teh bios as teh only
bootable filesystem.

another feature that was able to ne added as a direct result from this 
descison ws that the 'live filesystem' could be mounted quickly if it was 
needed. this 'secure' mainframe accessesterminal had a 100 mb sd0 solely for
root partition (fs) and sd1 and sd2 made up teh other 5 odd gb abd a dlt 
jukebox to round out the 'toy intel box' as it was sometimes not so 
affectionalely known.

> You need to prevent access to the reset button, power supply, and
> bootable floppy drive.

the reset button was disconnected as was teh power on off swithc. the machine 
itself was connected to the mainframes uninteruptable powersupply, a 10kwh 
diesel generator ... and a 2 kwh diesel as a 'justing, in case teh real ups 
failed" (tm).
 
> If that is not possible and you are concerned, do not put bootstrap
> code on the machine. Boot from floppy and then control physical access
> to the floppy only. Better than nothing I guess.

this always helps in security concious positions.

> That's MHO, anyway. Any discussion more in-depth than this should
> probably move to freebsd-security.

thier are also several good o'riely book on teh subgect.

this has been my personal experience, hope ti sheds some light on teh still 
described as a 'black art', that of the 'secure machine'.

hope this helped.

regards

jonathan

-- 
===============================================================================
Jonathan Michaels
PO Box 144, Rosebery, NSW 1445 Australia
===========================================================<jon@caamora.com.au>


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19990208152541.C28384>