On 12/8/20 9:39 PM, David Christensen wrote:
On 2020-12-08 07:29, Fred wrote:
Hello,
I bought a SanDisk Cruzer Glide USB stick. The fine print on the
package says it has SecureAccess software. It is so secure it
prevents me from writing to it without running the included Bill Gates
cancerous, virus infested, scourge of the Earth software.
fred@ragnok:/media/usb0$ ls -l
total 8416
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 16384 Jul 9 2018 SanDiskSecureAccess
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8600360 Nov 4 2016
SanDiskSecureAccessV3.01_win.exe
fred@ragnok:/media/usb0$
I have many SanDisk USB flash drives, including several Cruzer Glide.
They typically have an MBR partition scheme and one large VFAT or NTFS
partition.
"SanDisk Secure Access" is optional Windows encryption software that is
bundled with SanDisk USB flash drives. Use it, ignore it, or delete it
as you please; the software is not required to use the drive on any
computer that supports the factory partitioning scheme and filesystem.
When I was denied permission to write a file to the device as a regular
user I checked the permissions and then discovered root could not change
them. Being a hardware oriented person I was concerned the SecureAccess
software needed to change a write protect bit in the device and decided
to ask for help. I should have tried writing to the device as root but
being very busy I didn't. It is writable by root and anyone can read it
so there is no problem.
root@ragnok:/home/fred# chown fred /media/usb0
chown: changing ownership of '/media/usb0': Operation not permitted
Attempts to add write permission are also denied.
As you have not stated how you mounted the drive, I will assume that you
plugged it in, an icon appeared on the desktop, you interacted with the
icon, and the drive was mounted at /media/usb0. If so, AIUI the various
Debian desktops with automounting use FUSE. The user account running
the desktop and automounter will have whatever access controls that are
supported by the filesystem and/or by FUSE. But all other user
accounts, including the root account (!), are denied access to the
filesystem. This is a security feature of FUSE. See mount.fuse(8).
I do not use a DE. Just openbox and xterm/command line. Something
automagically mounts USB devices. Fuse is installed so maybe that is it.
Is there any way to disable or remove the SecureAccess software?
If you want to use the flash drive to move files between DOS, Windows,
Linux, macOS, BSD, etc., leave the factory partitioning scheme and
filesystem intact. Use the desktop to mount and unmount the filesystem
on the flash drive. Use the file manager or a normal, non-root,
terminal to delete or move aside the "Secure Access" stuff.
If you want to use the drive for some other purpose, such as burning a
Debian Installer ISO image onto it, do not mount the drive using the
desktop. (You may have to disable the desktop automounting feature).
Instead, open a terminal and use sudo(8) or su(1) to work with the drive.
David
Thanks for the help.
Best regards,
Fred
