Re: Goal / Danger: Attack by malicious root

On Mon, Jan 15, 2001 at 11:22:53AM -0500, Bennett Todd wrote:
> Now _if_ you had a situation where the machine was sufficiently
> thoroughly physically secured, and the software running on it
> sufficiently tightly configured, that you were confident that the OS
> wasn't tampered with, then the problem would reduce to a real oldie,
> the trusted path. The typical fix for that is to have the OS
> directly support a special hot-key combo that is absolutely
> guaranteed to terminate all processes associated with that console,
> and start a new login process, guaranteed to come from the real OS
> and not any trojan left running by the last person on that console.
> That would be easy to add to selinux. In fact, I thought I'd
> remembered seeing something along those lines, but when I just
> checked the todo.html I didn't find 'em, maybe my brain is playing
> nasty tricks on me.

Linux already has a secure attention key, you just have to enable it. Unfortunately it doesn't do very good, because when the X server is unexpectedly killed it often leaves the graphic card in unusable state.
>From a network login you can also just open a new ssh/telnet etc.

-Andi

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