Anyways, you've just offered yourself a Powerbook, you're incredibly happy about it and of course you feel incredibly secure (all your data in a safe place run by an OS based on the BSD4.0 kernel, Unix-like filesystem with all the permissions stuff, etc...). Pretty cool, but if your machine gets stolen, there is nothing (at least that I know of) that can stop the thief to access your information. How does he do it? Read on.
- Start the computer and immediately hold the "Command+S" keys: the computer starts in single mode and access to root privileges is provided.
- Quickly check the state of the filesystem before mounting it as read and write mode:
# /sbin/fsck -y
# /sbin/mount -wu - Now that full root access is provided, you can imagine the possibilities. A good one would be for example, starting up full system services (including network). The rest, I leave it for your imagination.
Well, for starters, pretty much every unix system has a single user account. It's not an exploit or a flaw or anything. It deliberately has no password and it deliberately gives you root access. It's main purpose is to recover passwords. That being said, you could apply an open firmware password which will stop anyone from booting anything. Even if that's case (or if single user mode did require a password), the thief could still just take the drive out and plug it into their computer, which is what any smart thief would do anyone because for all they know you could have call-home or self-destruct software executing on boot. Which leads us to the last point: encrypted home directories. If you're really worried about data getting stolen in case your laptop gets stolen, you should encrypt your home directory. Nothing short of scrambling the file contents is going to stop someone from inspecting the drive and finding data, and encrypting your home directory uses 128 AES to scramble the data and it's only decrypted when the user is logged in and mounts the partition.
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