Why sudo ubuntu

Smith is an expert at cybersecurity, cyber forensics, healthcare IT, SCADA security, physical security, investigations, organizational leadership and training. Derek spent 18 years as a special agent for various government agencies and the military. He is also a cyber security professor at the University of Maryland, University College and Virginia University of Science and Technology and has taught for over 25 years. Derek has written several books including Cybersense: The Leaders Guide to Protecting Critical Information, and its companion workbook, and he has contributed to several other books as an author and technical adviser.

Get the latest news, ideas, and tactics from BeyondTrust. You may unsubscribe at any time. I agree to receive product related communications from BeyondTrust as detailed in the Privacy Policy , and I may manage my preferences or withdraw my consent at any time.

Partners Support Search. Privileged Password Management Discover, manage, audit, and monitor privileged accounts and credentials. Secure Remote Access Centrally manage remote access for service desks, vendors, and operators. Remote Support Privileged Remote Access. Cloud Privilege Protection Enforce least privilege and manage access across cloud infrastructure.

Cloud Privilege Broker. Solutions The BeyondTrust Privileged Access Management portfolio is an integrated solution that provides visibility and control over all privileged accounts and users. Universal Privilege Management Our innovative Universal Privilege Management approach secures every user, asset, and session across your entire enterprise. September 28, Difference between sudo and su If you use a traditional Linux setup, you are familiar with using the su command to gain root privileges.

Allowing root user access using sudo In environments where security is a substantial concern, I recommend that you limit access to the root user account and password. How to create an Ubuntu sudo user The sudo command allows you to grant administrator privileges, usually only available to the root user, to regular users.

Steps to create a new sudo user 1 Log in to your Ubuntu server as the root user. I highly recommend that you use a secure password when setting this up. Set password prompts: Enter new Linux password: Retype new Linux password: passwd: password updated successfully Follow the prompts to set the new user's information. The editor specified by the policy is run to edit the temporary files. If they have been modified, the temporary files are copied back to their original location and the temporary versions are removed.

Users are never allowed to edit device special files. If the specified file does not exist, it will be created. Note that unlike most commands run by sudo , the editor is run with the invoking user's environment unmodified. If, for some reason, sudo is unable to update a file with its edited version, the user will receive a warning and the edited copy will remain in a temporary file.

If no -u option is specified, the command will be run as the invoking user. In either case, the primary group will be set to group. Depending on the policy, this may be the default behavior. Note that the sudoers plugin does not currently support running remote commands. This may also be used in conjunction with the -l option to list a user's privileges for the remote host. This means that login-specific resource files such as. If a command is specified, it is passed to the shell for execution via the shell's -c option.

If no command is specified, an interactive shell is executed. The command is run with an environment similar to the one a user would receive at log in. The Command environment section in the sudoers 5 manual documents how the -i option affects the environment in which a command is run when the sudoers policy is in use.

This option does not require a password. Not all security policies support credential caching. In other words, the next time sudo is run a password will be required. This option does not require a password and was added to allow a user to revoke sudo permissions from a. When used in conjunction with a command or an option that may require a password, this option will cause sudo to ignore the user's cached credentials. As a result, sudo will prompt for a password if one is required by the security policy and will not update the user's cached credentials.

A longer list format is used if this option is specified multiple times and the security policy supports a verbose output format. If a command is specified and is permitted by the security policy, the fully- qualified path to the command is displayed along with any command line arguments. If command is specified but not allowed, sudo will exit with a status value of 1. Enter a great secure password , then retype it to confirm.

The system will prompt you to enter additional information about the user. This includes a name, phone numbers, etc. Most Linux systems, including Ubuntu, have a user group for sudo users. To grant the new user elevated privileges, add them to the sudo group. The -aG option tells the system to append the user to the specified group. The -a option is only used with G. Note: Usermod command is a useful tool for user management. The system will respond by listing the username and all groups it belongs to, for example: newuser : newuser sudo.

Replace newuser with the username you entered in Step 1. Enter your password when prompted. You can run commands as normal, just by typing them. There is a learning curve associated with any OS and many new users try to take shortcuts by enabling the root account, logging in as root, and changing ownership of system files. Example: Broken system via ab use of root by a new user Please note: At the time of the post, this was the users' first post on the Ubuntu forums.

While some might call this a "learning experience", learning by breaking your system is frustrating and can result in data loss. Advantages and Disadvantages Benefits of using sudo There are a number of benefits to Ubuntu leaving root logins disabled by default, including: The installer has fewer questions to ask.

Users don't have to remember an extra password for occasional use i. If they did, they'd be likely to forget it or record it unsafely, allowing anyone to easily crack into their system. It avoids the "I can do anything " interactive login by default. You will be prompted for a password before major changes can happen, which should make you think about the consequences of what you are doing.

If you mess up, you can go back and see what commands were run. On a server, every cracker trying to brute-force their way in will know it has an account named root and will try that first. What they don't know is what the usernames of your other users are.

Since the root account password is locked, this attack becomes essentially meaningless, since there is no password to crack or guess in the first place. Allows easy transfer for admin rights by adding and removing users from groups. When you use a single root password, the only way to de-authorize users is to change the root password. The root account password does not need to be shared with everybody who needs to perform some type of administrative task s on the system see the previous bullet.

The authentication automatically expires after a short time which can be set to as little as desired or 0 ; so if you walk away from the terminal after running commands as root using sudo, you will not be leaving a root terminal open indefinitely. Downsides of using sudo Although for desktops the benefits of using sudo are great, there are possible issues which need to be noted: Redirecting the output of commands run with sudo requires a different approach. In a lot of office environments the ONLY local user on a system is root.

All other users are imported using NSS techniques such as nss-ldap. To setup a workstation, or fix it, in the case of a network failure where nss-ldap is broken, root is required. This tends to leave the system unusable unless cracked.

An extra local user, or an enabled root password is needed here. This is usually the case for root, but if adding a non-root rescue account, you will have to take these precautions manually. However the advantage of using a local user with sudo is that commands can be easily tracked, as mentioned in the benefits above.

Usage When using sudo, your password is stored by default for 15 minutes. After that time, you will need to enter your password again. It is being entered with each keystroke!