[Linux-disciples] Why no password for the root account?

[Chung-chieh Shan]

On 2005-04-30T15:26:19-0400, Dylan Thurston wrote:
> In general, it is never possible to secure a computer from an attacker
> with physical access.  Systems differ a little in how difficult they
> make it, but sometimes people feel that it's not worth pretending.

In the nuclear business, people try to secure a computer from an
attacker with physical access.  The following paper is interesting:
    http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/tamper.html
    http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/tamper.pdf

One author of this paper is Markus Kuhn, who has written lots more on
computer security (PhD thesis on computer display eavesdropping) as well
as Unicode, international date/time notation, international paper sizes,
etc.  Thread convergence!
    http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/
    http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html