Request: Easy way to "elevate" programs


An automated process modifying the sudoers file, yes, something that just goes off and does its thing as soon as you insert an SD card without any other user input.
Excuse me, but what would be the purpose of such script, exactly? If you're granting full access automatically on request, you get as much security as someone using "user ALL = NOPASSWD : ALL" config line.
 
Excuse me, but what would be the purpose of such script, exactly? If you're granting full access automatically on request, you get as much security as someone using "user ALL = NOPASSWD : ALL" config line.
Because "user ALL = NOPASSWD : ALL" grants full access to everything whereas an automated script can be made to only grant access to a whitelist.From thatgui's original description, it sounded like he wanted something that he could add "trusted" PNDs to and upon inserting the SD card they would automatically be given privileges so he wouldn't have to keep entering his password every time he wanted to run them. This was before he knew that PNDs are always mounted to the same location, however, and can easily be added to the sudoers file from their /mnt/utmp directory.

But regardless, it's irrelevant, whether it is useful or not says absolutely nothing about whether such an automated process is more or less secure than manually updating the sudoers file.

I don't think so
As has already been explained, the PND system is inherently insecure by design, anything can come along and replace the binary in the appdata directory and reap the benefits of the elevated privileges. This is especially true if you are using a FAT32 card. As soon as you type "sudo" you're taking a risk, your security is only as good as the file system protecting the file that you're running.
 
As has already been explained, the PND system is inherently insecure by design, anything can come along and replace the binary in the appdata directory and reap the benefits of the elevated privileges. This is especially true if you are using a FAT32 card. As soon as you type "sudo" you're taking a risk, your security is only as good as the file system protecting the file that you're running.
Sorry, my bad, thought this was aimed in another direction (discussion wise).
 
14 minutes? did you somehow get Linux running on an old 8086 processor?
I don't see why it wouldn't, that's still x86 isn't it? It'd just be slow as #$%&!
Not any off the shelf Linux distribution, as linux itself was initially released requiring a 386 and you can still find some distributions compiled to i386 still.. Also most 8086/8088 machines only had a maximum of 640KBs of system ram which is very limiting.. However there has one project that has done just that: http://elks.sourceforge.net/FAQ-English.html
 
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