Kata1yst

Over the years of using Vim both professionally and for my own uses, I’ve learned to just install LunarVim and only add a handful of packages/overrides. Otherwise I just waste too much time tinkering and not doing the things I need to.

That’s called ‘privilege escalation’, and replacing system level calls with user level calls is closely watched for and guarded against with many different security measures including SELinux.

You’ve already outed yourself multiple times in this thread as someone who doesn’t understand how security in the real world works. Take the L and try to learn from this. It’s okay not to understand something. But it’s very important to recognize when that happens and not claim to understand better than someone else.

I strongly disagree with your premise. Separating authentication and privilege escalation adds layers of security that are non-trivial and greatly enhance resilience. Many attacks are detected and stopped at privilege escalation, because it happens locally before a user can stop or delete the flow of logs.

If I get into your non-privileged account I can set up a program that acts like sudo

No you cannot. A non privileged user doesn’t have the access necessary to run a program that can accomplish this.

And even if they do it’s too late anyway because I’ve just compromised root and locked everybody out and I’m in there shitting on the filesystems or whatever. Because root can do anything.

Once again, you didn’t privilege escalate, because once you have a foothold (authentication) you don’t have the necessary privileges, so you must perform reconnaissance to identify an exploitable vector to privilage escalate with. This can be any number of things, but it’s always noisy and slow, usually easy to detect in logs. There is a reason the most sophisticated attacks against well protected targets are “low and slow”.

And if I can’t break into your non-privileged account then I can’t break into a privileged account either.

You’re ignoring my points given regarding the risks of compromised keys. If there are no admin keys, there are no remote admin sessions.

These artificial distinctions between “non-privileged” and “superuser” accounts need to stop. This is not good security, this is not zero trust. Either you don’t trust anybody and enforce explicit privilege escalation for specific things, or just accept that you’re using a “super” paradigm and once you’ve got access to that user all bets are off.

Spoken like someone who has never red teamed or purple teamed. Even admin accounts are untrusted, given only privileges specific to their role, and closely monitored. That doesn’t mean they should have valid security measures thrown away.

Wouldn’t separate SSH keys achieve the same?

Separate ssh keys for the user and the admin? Yeah, see point 2, admins should not be remotely accessible.

Really? How, exactly? Break the ssh key authentication? And wouldn’t that apply to all accounts equally?

Keys aren’t perfect security. They can easily be mishandled, sometimes getting published to GitHub, copied to USB drives which can easily be lost, etc.

Further, there have been attacks against SSH that let malicious actors connect remotely to any session, or take over existing sessions. By not allowing remote access on privileged accounts, you minimize risk.

Forcing a non privileged remote session to authenticate with a password establishes a second factor of security that is different from the first. This means a cracked password or a lost key is still not enough for a malicious actor to accomplish administrative privileges.

A key is something you have

A password is something you know

So, by not allowing remote privileged sessions, we’re forcing a malicious actor to take one more non-trivial step before arriving at their goals. A step that will likely be fairly obvious in logs on a monitored machine.

On a server, it allows you to track who initiates which root season session. It also greatly minimizes the attack surface from a security perspective to have admin privileged accounts unable to be remotely connected to.