[SNIPPED all for brevity]
It has been pretty much accepted in Commercial Industry that if you have
physical access to a computer, there is no real security. A floppy disk
will boot linux, mount the root fs and execute bash.
SunOS will boot from a CDROM, you can then hack at the root fs all you
want.
Even VAX/VMS (the minion of security), can be booted into SYSBOOT from
the console, set SYSUAFALT to 1 and continue. Then anyone can log in
as SYSTEM (like root) from the console. If there IS an alternate
password file, you just use N > 1.
There are back-doors on every machine I know about so the person who has
physical possession can take control. Otherwise, you'd be hard-pressed to
sell used equipment.
There is even a "general-purpose" password that will get you into
the ROM-BIOS Setup of most computers. This is so you don't have
to short out the battery if the password is lost.
If you need security, you put the machine in a locked room and
access it over the network or a serial link. That's what we do
with all our servers including name-servers, etc.
Cheers,
Dick Johnson
***** FILE SYSTEM MODIFIED *****
Penguin : Linux version 2.1.105 on an i586 machine (66.15 BogoMips).
Warning : It's hard to remain at the trailing edge of technology.
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