[SOLVED] Can "sudo su" be safe?

Originally Posted by abejarano By unrecoverable issues is meant permanently unrecoverable? Would you give an example of unrecoverable when when a backup exists offline?

Unrecoverable means you will lose something which cannot be recovered at all (like personal data). Obviously a backup may help to avoid that situation.
Unrecoverable may mean you cannot recover any change made after the last backup.
Recovering always has a cost. If you can't afford that the data loss is permanent.

Depending on your distro, you may have root shell available from grub advanced options anyway. So somebody in your home can already get root access fairly easily even if you didnt leave the terminal in a root session.

If the reason you leave terminal in root shell is you're tired of entering your password, you know you can increase the length of time before sudo asks for password again? That eliminates the other concern people have with your method of doing root tasks and accidentally thinking its a normal user terminal when entering things, cuz you still have to type sudo when you need such privs....

echo "Defaults timestamp_timeout=120" | sudo tee /etc/sudoers.d/timeout

I use 120 minutes, but you could set it much higher if you want...

Originally Posted by enigma9o7 Depending on your distro, you may have root shell available from grub advanced options anyway. So somebody in your home can already get root access fairly easily even if you didnt leave the terminal in a root session. If the reason you leave terminal in root shell is you're tired of entering your password, you know you can increase the length of time before sudo asks for password again? That eliminates the other concern people have with your method of doing root tasks and accidentally thinking its a normal user terminal when entering things, cuz you still have to type sudo when you need such privs.... echo "Defaults timestamp_timeout=120" | sudo tee /etc/sudoers.d/timeout I use 120 minutes, but you could set it much higher if you want...

Or use doas or sudo configured so that it does not require a password.

If you actually type "sudo su" or "sudo" or "su", you make privilege escalation very easy: an attacker can simply alias "sudo" to something else.

I wasn't going to comment any more on this thread ( probably ), but I would never

Or use doas or sudo configured so that it does not require a password.

Originally Posted by chrism01 I wasn't going to comment any more on this thread ( probably ), but I would never

I would, but only for specific non-destructive commands.

Every security decision requires at LEAST an informal risk analysis, and often risk remediation. In the case of sudo and doas, limiting the things you can do without using a password to those things that cannot do damage seems a good FIRST step!

Keeping also in mind that configuring the REST of your node to be secure is just as important.