How do you feel about sudo

Hi all,

I was just crious to know your thoughts about sudo i.e. does it really enhance security or do you feel that it doesn't provide with much security as Ubuntu folks think :slight_smile: And also post your personal experiences of using sudo and your first thoughts about it and any suggestions to improve sudo mechanism(specially from Ubuntu point of view).

Regards,
Tayyab

PS: Sorry for the typo in the title and problem is that I can't correct it also.

sudo does not enhance security. Remove sudo and you will have a more secure system. But if you want to give a non-root user the power to run a few commands as root, sudo is a way to do that. sudo is open source and it has been around for quite a while. Lots of very smart people have inspected it for problems. There don't seem to be any surprises lurking in it. sudo is configurable and it can easily be misconfigured. So I trust sudo but I trust a system with sudo in use only after I inspect the configuration. One better approach is to not need sudo or anything like it. Need a command run as root? Contact an SA. Need to run a command as oracle? Contact a DBA.

An alternative is RBAC (role based access control). The NSA (National Security Agency) assembled a team to develop an RBAC system for Linux and actually posted the source code on the net. I believe that the required kernel changes have been roled into the latest linux kernel. Some distros support RBAC. I don't know a lot about RBAC. Not too many people do... it's rather new. It could certainly be misconfigured as well.

BTW, I fixed that typo.