SUDO

Allow root to run any commands anywhere

sudo command can be used by ethical hackers to get privilege of your system.

Why do we need different users ?

Whenever we run any command on our O.S running it with root user gives different privileges to command. 🦸
➜ ~ whoami
chetan

➜ ~ id
uid=1000(chetan) gid=1000(chetan) groups=1000(chetan)

➜ ~ sudo su ✔ system
➜ ~:/home/chetan# whoami
root

➜ ~:/home/chetan# id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root)

There are certain commands which cannot be run by normal user i.e user with non-root privileges. ❌
➜ ~ cat /etc/shadow
cat: /etc/shadow: Permission denied
➜ ~ sudo su
[root@ip-172-31-49-98 ec2-user]# cat /etc/shadow
root:!!:18012:0:99999:7:::

As you can see we cannot run cat /etc/shadow with normal user but when we login to root account by running command
sudo su and then again try, it works. 😃
In all linux systems, root user is automatically created with id 0.

Root account can be dangerous at somtimes, that's why we disable root account in real server. 🗄
Adding new user
You can create new user in linux using useradd command. 🕴
New user can only be added by root user.

Since some real server doesn't have root account as I said earlier, you have to run useradd command with prefixing with
sudo , this is called as privilege escalation. :set

sudo stands for superuser-do

sudo has internal configuration file located at /etc/sudoers 📑

we can give extra privilege to normal user by editing /etc/sudoers

➜ ~ sudo cat /etc/shadow 1 ↵ system

[sudo] password for chetan:
daemon:*:17001:0:99999:7:::
bin:*:17001:0:99999:7:::

Lets say we create two users Tom 🐱 and Jerry 🐀

Files created by Tom cannot be read by Jerry.

To resolve this, you'll run ls command with either root privileges or different user privileges.

SUDO 1
 ➜ ~ sudo -u linux /etc/shadow

Here, we are reading /etc/shadow with linux user's privileges.

sudo -l displays what user privileges current user has.

When you run sudo for first time, it prompts for password.

We can disable this by editing /etc/sudoers file and setting NOPASSWD: ALL.

Giving privileges to all users of group

One way to grant privileges to multiple users is by giving privilege to group that has all users. 👪
➜ ~ # groupadd avengers
➜ ~ # useradd -G avengers tom
➜ ~ # useradd -G avengers jerry
➜ ~ # cat /etc/group
avengers:x:1002:tom,jerry
tom:x:1003:
jerry:x:1004:

As you can see above, we've added two users tom and jerry to group avengers.

Now we'll give ALL privileges to group avengers.

# vi /etc/sudoers
## Allow root to run any commands anywhere
root ALL=(ALL) ALL

%avengers ALL=(ALL) ALL

You have to use % in front of group name.

Remote Login Privileges.

whenever logging from remote system you can set privileges to certain user to restrict its access.

ssh -l lwuser 192.168.0.162 sudo yum install vsftpd

-l is a flag used to specify username.

Remote system won't ask you for password if you have set NOPASSWORD: ALL ⌨
or else it will give error sudo: no tty present and no askpass program specified. ❌

ssh -t -l lwuser 192.168.0.162 sudo yum install vsftpd

Here -t will ask for root password after we have login to remote system. 💻
Thank you 🙂

SUDO 2