[techtalk] partitioning security (was lilo)

[Caitlyn M. Martin]

coldfire wrote:

> let's suppose that you have the entire filesystem mounted on a single
> partition (/).  an attacker could do a number of things .. if they had
> shell access without quota, they could write a simple program that forks
> and recursively creates directories effectively consuming all of the
> inodes on that filesystem.  granted, a small percentage of the filesystem
> is reserved for the superuser, this would cause all kinds of problems with
> other processes that attempt to create temporary files, logs, etc.

Yes, but you could do that equally effectively over multiple partitions.  You've
assumed the cracker can login.  Why not do a df then modify the script to do what
you describe to each and every partition?  I still don't see how breaking things
up into several partitions actually enhances security.

> it's very simple to have the same effect on a system remotely (logs).

Yes, but again, that's true even if /var and/or /var/log and/or /tmp are separate
file systems.

-Caity