Not sure what this article is trying to say. I can gain "root access" just by dismantling the hard drive and mounting it on a machine I own.<p>This is exactly why everybody should be using full-disk encryption. It is ridiculously easy to set it up both on OS X (with FileVault) and Linux (with a plethora of options), and even on Windows machines. There is absolutely no reason why not to do this.
One does not even need to enable password protection of Grub. Linux will ask for the root password before granting access to recovery mode. That stopped working at the early 2000s. The author must use a pretty stupid distro to not notice it by 2013.<p>Anyway, want to gain access to the computer? Get a screwdriver.
If enabled, you use a firewire connection. You don't even need to reboot and can connect as root to any running processes and filesystems.<p><a href="http://www.breaknenter.org/projects/inception/" rel="nofollow">http://www.breaknenter.org/projects/inception/</a><p>Yes, that is actual working technology.
If it has sensitive data on it, the Linux computer should be locked in a room. Physical access = ownership, every sysadmin knows that. Plan 9 terminals don't have passwords for user accounts, if you want access to privileged data you then have to authenticate with the dedicated authorization server. Linux is a 1960s OS, it boggles the mind people even still use it.
You're in front of a Linux computer. You compile an exploit you read about on Slashdot, run the resulting executable, and voila!, you are dropped into a root shell. After a couple of seconds you realize that you have <i>no</i> ideas on what to do next. That's when it registers that you are not as "young" as you once were ...
Edit the kernel entry in grub to boot into single user mode (by appending a 1 to the line), boot, you're now free to change root's password.<p>This is what we did to a number of machines at this year's SouthWest CCDC we were provided no login information for.
Alt+Magic sysreq key+b
Put in a USB stick with Puppy Linux.
Boot, Root.<p>Or did we need to get root access to the previous running OS? Be more specific in that case ;)