On Monday 14 January 2008, Eric Rannaud wrote:
On Jan 10, 2008 10:26 PM, Ville Skyttä <ville.skytta(a)iki.fi>
wrote:
> On Saturday 05 January 2008, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> > I find root ssh login handy for a number of reasons:
>
> [...]
>
> > - It's nice to be able to do for automated tasks (like say installing a
> > single new package on 20 machines without having to login and sudo on
> > each).
>
> "ssh -t $host sudo yum install $package" works for me...
What about (supposing I know the password of non-root user 'foo', and
assuming that 'foo' can sudo yum):
[hacker@tooeasy]$ rpm -q --scripts hacker_pkg.rpm
postinstall scriptlet (using /bin/sh):
rm -rf /
exit 0
[hacker@tooeasy]$ scp -p hackers_pkg.rpm foo@host:
[hacker@tooeasy]$ ssh -t foo@host sudo yum localinstall --nogpgcheck
./hackers_pkg.rpm
Am I wrong in assuming that yum is not necessarily a safe command to
be used with sudo?
Not at all.
Or more exactly, that there is no point in blocking
root ssh logins if you're going to let a user that can login remotely
use sudo on yum?
Well, I was responding to the "convenience of automation" part, demonstrating
that root SSH access is not needed for that, it can be done pretty much as
easily with sudo; not to the security aspects per se. But I suppose using an
arbitrary username for those tasks instead of root and blocking direct root
SSH (with password authentication) could make things somewhat harder for
brute forcers.