Sus - A _SECURE_ enhancer for su (sus doesn't sux)

[Nick Andrew]

tchrist at convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) writes:

>And this is a feature???  If there are users who can become root
>without a password, then it's MUCH easier to subvert the system.

My feed site used an elegant scheme for distributing root access
among several authorised people. Called 'sus', it worked this way:

'sus -a'	to Authorise yourself for root privileges. 'sus -a' would
		ask for your 'sus password', which was stored encrypted in
		sus's password file. Only people in the 'sus' group can
		use the sus command.

'sus command'	After doing a 'sus -a', this executed 'command' with root
		privileges. No password is required. And the command can
		be 'csh' if a root shell is required. And the command can
		be executed multiple times.

'sus -p'	To change your sus password. 

'sus -d'	To De-Authorise yourself for root privileges. After doing
		'sus -d', no root commands can be done until doing another
		'sus -a' (and specifying your sus password again)

So you see this solution satisfies all criteria:

- It isn't a security hole. Only specified users can run sus.
- Before root permissions can be gained, a password is required.
- It is convenient to use, as the password need be entered only once per
  login session.
- Only the head System Administrator knows the root password.
- Everybody else has their own 'sus' password which is secure.
- Sus does its own logging. It can be modified to do secure logging when
  a network is in use by opening a connection to a sus logger on a remote
  machine. The remote machine should not allow root access from the local
  machine, and none of the sus users should have root access on the remote
  machine. Therefore, sus's actions can be logged securely.

Nick.
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