How secure is UNIX?

[Ray Shwake]

In article <1557 at quando.UUCP> omerzu at quando.UUCP (Thomas Omerzu) writes:
>
>but have you ever tried to remove public read permissions
>from /etc/passwd?
>Very funny results, not the simplest 'ls -l' will work ...

I recently structured permissions on one password file such that one
group - let's call them outsider - can't access /etc/passwd, but others
can. Simply assign GROUP ownership of /etc/password to the outsider
group and take away their read permission. viz.

-rw----r--   1 bin      outsider    1041 May 02 16:26 /etc/passwd

BTW, many new UNIX implementations post-3.2 support password shadowing,
such that the encrypted passwords are NOT publicly accessible.