On Sat, 2008-11-22 at 11:47 +0100, Mario Vukelic wrote: > On Fri, 2008-11-21 at 16:19 +0000, Andrew Sayers wrote: > > To address the actual point, security of files on removable media can > > only be handled at the hardware level, by making sure bad people don't > > steal your disks. Bad guys can be assumed to have root access to at > > least one box that they can plug a drive into, so complex permissions > > systems on removable media serve only to frustrate ordinary users. > > I have to disagree here. I have several USB disks attached to my > computer, and while I agree that this provides no security against an > attack, it does provide protection against user errors, just as it does > on internal disks. A disk being external does not preclude that several > users access it and want protection from the other guy unintentionally > deleting their files.
Such cases can be handled, for sure. You can mark disks with, for example, a magic file in the root directory, so that the system knows that permissions must be acknowledged. Even better, the magic file could be associated with the machine that created the permissions (and for which the user and group ids make sense.) Other machines would just ignore the permissions. I'm not a kernel hacker; it's hard for me to estimate the effort for implementing such an idea. But it sounds viable to me. Cheers, M. S. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
