shell for certification exam

[Ross Werner]

On Wed, 9 Nov 2005, Jason Holt wrote:
> On Tue, 8 Nov 2005, Ross Werner wrote:
>> they can turn off whatever customizations you have created. In the security 
>> world, having physical access to a computer basically means that there is 
>> no way to completely secure that computer.
>
> Well, it depends on what you mean by "console access".  The BYU kiosks are 
> pretty good nowadays, AFAICT.  Keep them from opening the case, out of the 
> bios and bootloader, and then it's down to limiting what an unprivileged user 
> can do.

Indeed. By "physical access" I mean full physical access. Once you even 
mitigate that with "supervised physical access" it becomes much more 
difficult for a malicious attacker to circumvent the system.

(For example, I'm sure the proctors at these exams will notice somebody 
opening a case and tripping the BIOS password reset. They'd *probably* 
notice someone switching to a virtual terminal long enough to figure out 
what's up with the iptables configuration and do something to get around 
it. They probably *wouldn't* notice someone switching to a virtual 
terminal long enough to paste the exam text into an ssh session, if done 
surreptitiously.)

 	~ Ross