Comments on: Reset a password in Ubuntu

By: Links 13/3/2010: AMD Comes to Sub-notebooks, Tiny and Big (Game) for GNU/Linux | Boycott Novell

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 23:29:12 +0000

[...] Reset a password in Ubuntu [...]

By: anonymous coward

anonymous coward — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:24:56 +0000

Even if I can’t answer your questions directly, as I don’t use Ubuntu, here are some things you might want to know about. They are old hats already and might *partially* not be relevant anymore, though:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_boot_attack
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/02/cold_boot_attac.html
http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/physical-memory-attacks-via-firewire-dma-part-1-overview-and-mitigation
http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Slack

And let’s not forget swap partitions/files and temporary files somewhere on drives. And/or wear levelling on flash drives…

There are always many levels of security/saftey. It all depends on your needs/paranoia…

Look up ‘digital forensics’ if you are interested. Oh, and ‘file carving’. And ‘key logger’. And ‘sniffing’. And …

By: Ignacio

Ignacio — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 19:41:05 +0000

Steve, could you explain in more detail why ubuntu is so insecure? If you’re going to tell us about the usual sudo complaints, then don’t bother. In fact, for a desktop or laptop computer using sudo is not bad at all. OTOH, if you consider using sudo in a server that’s another story, easily changeable by any sysadmin. For the rest, I believe Ubuntu services are as secure as any other distros’.

By: ScottK

ScottK — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 15:16:47 +0000

Access to the user account and access to the encrypted home are two different things. Changing the user password does not change the password to access the encrypted home. The two accesses are not directly related.

Yes, I have tried this.

By: Destillat #12 | duetsch.info - Open Source, Wet-, Web-, Software

Destillat #12 | duetsch.info - Open Source, Wet-, Web-, Software — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 10:09:23 +0000

[...] Reset a password in Ubuntu [...]

By: steve

steve — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 07:27:57 +0000

If you have physical access yet can still gain access to a machine that is security at it’s worst. Add that to another reason I would never use Ubuntu. In an effort to make life easier for the casual user they have sacrificed security. IMO Ubu is the MS of the Linux world and we are all worse off for it.

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 04:46:17 +0000

I’m not 100 percent sure. Seems to me if someone has access to your computer, and they can access recovery mode, then they can change your password and access your account. Encryption might not stop them if they can sign on as you.

By: Chris

Chris — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 02:36:21 +0000

I’m am so going to encrypt my /home/ when I upgrade Jaunty…that will at least make my stuff unreadable even if they reset the password right?

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 21:01:22 +0000

Makes sense. I’ve always told customers their machines are not safe if they’re not physically secure – with any OS, if the data’s not encrypted, you can just pop the drive into another machine and sudo your way to any data. Heck, MacOSX just ignores permissions on external drives by default.

By: Reset a password in Ubuntu | Ubuntu-News - Your one stop for news about Ubuntu

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 20:44:45 +0000

[...] should take you about 10 seconds to finish, give or take for the actual speed of the machine. More here First restart, and then watch closely as the computer starts up again. After the BIOS screen [...]