How secure would a guest user be?

**t048** · 03-10-2002, 10:27 PM

How secure would it be to have a guest user on my box?

**ph34r** · 03-10-2002, 10:34 PM

Potentially very. It all depends on how you set it up.

If I was going to allow generic guest access, I'd look into a chroot jail with some serious permission editing on what you do allow access to.

**stryder144** · 03-10-2002, 10:56 PM

How secure would it be to have a guest user on my box? *

Like ph34r said, it just depends on what kind of security "perimeter" you put up. How is the person going to log in? Are they going to ssh in? Web access? All the different ways that you could let them access your box can be made more secure or more insecure. Check out http://www.linuxsecurity.com/. It should give you some good tips on securing your box.

**Ashcrow** · 03-10-2002, 10:59 PM

For one it depends on what you mean by guest. Is it guest on a service or guest on the whole box (via ssh, telnet). Unless you must have access from the outside it is not a good idea. If you must, then you should put the most restrictive permissions on the accoutn possible, chroot their home dir (if you can), and take other super paranoid steps to make sure a 10 year old pimple puss doesn't 0wnz j00.

**stryder144** · 03-10-2002, 11:01 PM

10 year old pimple puss doesn't 0wnz j00.

lol...I have never heard it put that way before...that's funny.

**t048** · 03-10-2002, 11:17 PM

I was thinking more of local access. For example, I use this computer often, so I have an account, as do some other people. But there are sometimes when someone needs to use this computer just once or twice. I was thinking a guest account would be easier than setting up new users for everyone unless they really needed their own account.