Yet another Linux on the desktop article

[Monty J. Harder]

"Uncle Jim" <jim at jimani.com> wrote:

> I realize that physical access to the hardware means all bets are off but
automount
> is equivalent to root with no password.

  Only if it's automount that blindly assumes that the ownership and
permissions on the foreign filesystem are authentic.

  If I make a setuid root bash and put it in a tarball, then try untarring
it on your machine, tar simply changes the owner of the file to be that of
the logged-in user.  It ought to be possible to do automount that does
similar, or perhaps refuses to recognize executable bit on non-directories.