Operating System - Linux
1748089 Members
4719 Online
108758 Solutions
New Discussion юеВ

Re: regarding elevating privilages

 
madhusudan_1
Occasional Contributor

regarding elevating privilages


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?
2 REPLIES 2
~sesh
Esteemed Contributor

Re: regarding elevating privilages

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.
Ivan Ferreira
Honored Contributor

Re: regarding elevating privilages

"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.
Por que hacerlo dificil si es posible hacerlo facil? - Why do it the hard way, when you can do it the easy way?