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Comment by admax88q | Hacker News Reader

I honestly have no faith in multi user linux. I would never give someone I didn't trust an unprivileged account on my system, nor physical access to my device.

There are so few multi user machines in existence that I doubt this mode of usage will ever get enough attention to be even moderately secure.

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All nontrivial multi-user installations I'm aware of (universities, corporate, ... make it a dozen I've had to deal with) have one thing in common: none of them use things like accountsservice, policykit et al. Any extra plumbing, if necessary, is done through PAM one way or another.

Pretty much all servers I’ve ever worked with was multi-user. What’s even the alternative? A single account shared by all admins? That sounds like a nightmare from both a security and an auditing perspective.

But in that case hopefully all the admins are trusted. Parent was talking about untrusted users.

Right, my response was primarily to the claim that “there are so few multi user machines in existence”.

As for trust, there are probably few, if any, attack vectors more common than privilege escalation, so I’m not sure I follow that line of reasoning either.

machines in universities are typically multi user

The students are also trusted, or at least accountable. It's very different than a random stranger. That said, I wouldn't store anything truly private in a shared box like that, specially in the university, where the boxes are likely to be maintained by inexperienced undergrads.

> The students are also trusted

That is a tall bet :D

If anyone is going to try out crazy stuff for the sake of curiosity/pranks, it would be students.

> I doubt this mode of usage will ever get enough attention to be even moderately secure.

Don't shared web hosts count?

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