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Shell history scrubbing

Use /etc/shadow to remove passwords from shell history file
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The password shadow file can be used relatively easily to check whether a particular string matches a particular user's password without being capable of producing that password. (See "cryptographic hashing" or "P vs NP problem".) Sysadmins get lazy and forget that shell command history might be retained in plain text, but an absence of this logging is bad pratice in a shared administration environment. My personal favorite example is calling SQLPLUS against Oracle with a plain-text password on the command line. The proposed solution has one of two potential embodiments, but the core is the same: Use the /etc/shadow password hashes to exhaustively search the shell history for phrases with hash collisions. This search might include a predefined set of critical accounts on a system with a lot of users. As option 1, this search might be done the moment the shell history is committed to disk, or as option 2, it might be done as a cron job to simply reduce the exposure time, rotating the log after the scrub operation. (In the specific case of Oracle, a different hash source could be used, too.)
kevinthenerd, Jan 30 2015

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       ?
popbottle, Jan 31 2015
  

       What [popbottle] said.
MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 31 2015
  

       I assumed it was some kind of corporate greenwashing for petrochemical giants.
pocmloc, Jan 31 2015
  

       Option 3 would be to scan the log for known password parameter flags or positions and to selectively purge only those. Might work out of the box for 99% of standard software.
Toto Anders, Jan 31 2015
  

       A small hardware addition and shell patch could be made so that electric shocks of increasing severity are applied to the operator when passwords are used on the command line.
Spacecoyote, Jan 31 2015
  

       This is a pleasingly roundabout solution to an obscure but not non-existent problem. Well half-baked, Mr [thenerd]. [+]
pertinax, Feb 01 2015
  

       What [pertinax] said. Although this type of solution bothers me a little: When the computer uses a fairly complex algorithm to identify things to delete automatically, it can sometimes lead to trouble.   

       One time I was writing a batch file that I wanted to automatically download a file from the our corporate intranet. I wanted it to run on any windows machine with no extra software, so I found some same code (VB script I think) that would pull that file down. I put that sample code into the script, saved it to disk, But when I tried to run the batch file, it was gone. Luckily it was still open in my text editor... It took me quite a while to figure out that the virus scanner was deleting the file, probably because some virus had used the same sample code. I was able to get around it by rearranging a few lines of code or something, but then I decided to use a different method since that behavior was rather virus-like and I didn't want my scrip to stop working...
scad mientist, Feb 01 2015
  

       There must be some intended purpose for the shell history or it wouldn't exist though right? couldn't scrubbing this cause more problems?
bob, Feb 01 2015
  

       //an absence of this logging is bad pratice in a shared administration environment//   

       It's not any sort of logging at all, and treating it like it is would be a very bad practice indeed. Two or more simultaneously activated shells will not necessarily both log their history, and even if they do it won't be in any predictable order. A command's existence in the history file tells you nothing about when it was run (even relative to other commands in the file), and its non-existence is absolutely no evidence that it wasn't.
ytk, Feb 01 2015
  

       //A small hardware addition and shell patch could be made so that electric shocks of increasing severity are applied to the operator when passwords are used on the command line.//   

       Change your password to rm -rf*
You''d soon learn.
Loris, Feb 01 2015
  


 

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