Any alternate to sudo

[KPKIND]

Hi *,

I have a requirement where the operator needs to kill the users who have logged in to the application,so thought it would be worth if I use sudo. But the number of operators whom I have give access to the kill command is around 6,which worries me a bit. Just to let you know all these operators go in to a menu driven program as soon as they login and all the key sequences are trapped. Is it still a threat to the system or a compromise of the security. If so it would be great if some one let me know an alternative for this situation.

Thanks

Kumar

 

[KenCunningham]

As long as you set restrictions/allowables appropriately, I wouldn't see a problem. Isn't that what sudo's for?

 

[KPKIND]

Yes the purpose of sudo is that,but I am just worried a bit only b'coz the access I am allowing is for the command "kill".

Cheers

Kumar

 

[KenCunningham]

I take your point (and missed it earlier!). I guess it comes down to how much you trust your operators, and what management procedures are in place to prevent misuse. As long as you have an audit trail it shouldn't be an issue IMHO.

 

[KPKIND]

Yes,we trust our operators but trying to even eliminate that last chance of misuse, that's all. Is there any alternate route for this task .......

 

[alexhu]

Is this a one off requirement ? i.e do they need to kill users on an individual basis or just everyone in the application ? If the latter then could you not invoke a root level script with sudo - they wouldn't have access to the kill command then.

Alex

 

[KPKIND]

This sounds better....What I will do is,I will keep the code to kill the users in a script owned by root and run this script using sudo from the operators program...

Thanks a lot
Kumar

 

[hfaix]

Make sure the scripted owned by root, is only writeable by root. This is a better solution then giving access to kill.

 

[RodKnowlton]

Also be sure that the script does its own logging of what it does, since the sudo log will only show that the script itself was run.



Rod Knowlton
IBM Certified Advanced Technical Expert pSeries and AIX 5L
CompTIA Linux+
CompTIA Security+

 

[columb]

I do something along these lines where the user name is passed to the script as a parameter so the Help Desk operators can run

kill_proc.ksh <user name>

The first thing that kill_proc.ksh does is to check that the UID of <user name> is > 1000 - i.e. not root!
Alternatively you can edit the sudoers file to prevent certain users being used as a parameter. Check the web site which has examples of this using passwd (which you might also want to give your Help Desk operators like we have)
I don't want to sound like a salesman but sudo is the biz when granting functions to the Help Desk (and no - I don't have shares in them!)

Columb Healy