topic regarding elevating privilages in Operating System - Linux

regarding elevating privilages

madhusudan_1 — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 11:18:46 GMT

Hi all,

while going through the linux basics syllabus i came across a topic called " ELEVATING YOUR PRIVILAGES" what this exactly means? and how we can elevate privilages?
can someone help me in this regard?

Re: regarding elevating privilages

~sesh — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 12:21:32 GMT

Elevating user privileges means that the user gets more rights to do something on the system. Generally, it is getting "root" permissions for a normal user.

root as you might know is the top user / administrator of the Linux system without any restrictions.

Getting higher privileges is achieved by running commands as su (super user).

For e.g. I'm logged into a Linux system as adric, but I need to edit the fstab file. I need the root access to do so.

If I issue:
vi /etc/fstab

I will only get read-only rights.

To elevate my privileges, I have to use either:

$ sudo vi /etc/fstab

OR

$ su
# vi /etc/fstab

su = super user; do = as in the English word. :)

Again, observe that a normal user will have a "$" prompt, and root will have a "#" prompt to differentiate.

Re: regarding elevating privilages

Ivan Ferreira — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 14:32:03 GMT

"ELEVATING YOUR PRIVILAGES" is also referred to the posibility to attack, as a normal user, a service that runs, for example as root, exploding a bug on it, so you can run arbitrary commands as the user who runs the service on the target machine.