Analysis of methods for organizing user rights in GNU\Linux systems

Abstract

This article is about user’s rights to files or directories. The GNU\Linux systems have many great security features, but one of the most important is the file permissions system. Methods for organizing user rights in GNU\Linux systems, such as granting rights to each user individually and grouping users with the same or similar rights into groups, are discussed. The concept of operating system user and superuser is formed. The benefits of grouping users by access level have been identified. The criteria for dividing users into groups are analyzed, depending on the format of computer use, the structure of the organization that owns a particular computer and the number and positions of people who will work with it. Also, the benefit of the mechanism of organizing users into groups to manage service users of services running in the system is considered. It is said that any file and directory in Linux has an owner user and an owner group. That is, any file and directory belongs to some system user and some group. In addition, any file and directory has three access rights groups: one for the owner user, one for members of the owner group, and one for all other users on the system. Each group consists of the rights to read, write and execute the file for execution. The format of saving rights to a file or directory and the mechanism of checking access to a file or directory are considered. An explanation is given of what the right to read, the right to modify and the right to execute means for the file and for the directory. It is with the help of these sets of permissions that the permissions of files in linux are established. Each user can only have full access to files that he owns or those that he is allowed to access. Only the Root user can work with all files, regardless of their set of permissions.