On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 9:47 AM, Arun Khan knura9@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 12:08 AM, gnulinuxist@gmail.com wrote:
Friends,
With so much espionage happening in computers, I was wondering whether a
read only mounted partition is read only by software only or is there an electrical lock on the hdd, which does not seem possible for multi-partition disks as another partition may be writeable.
No electrical lock. Anyone with root/sudo (with rights to mount) can do 'mount -o remount,rw <fs_dir_tree>'
Can a malicious software gain control of the electrical side of the hdd
and modify or delete data, even on a read only mounted partition? For the military then, would it be better to use an entire disk as a single partition and lock it down electrically?
The 3.5" disks have pin outs, one of these pairs can be jumpered to make the *entire* disk 'ro' - this takes care of remote root/sudo scenarios. Anyone with physical access can easily remove the jumper and make the *entire* disk 'rw'
Afair the jumper is not hardwired and a trojan bios (or raw driver) can ignore the lock.
-- Arun Khan Sent from my non-iphone/non-android device (অরুণ খান্/अरुण खान) -- http://mm.ilug-bom.org.in/mailman/listinfo/linuxers