Security – Does /etc/fstab need to be world readable

fstabpermissionsSecurity

I would like to put network share mounts in /etc/fstab, but by default that file is world-readable which allows everyone to read the credentials I put into the mount options.

Is it safe to make /etc/fstab not readable by anyone other than root, e.g. owned by root:root with permissions 0640?

FWIW, I am using Debian Squeeze/Wheezy and Ubuntu LTS.

Best Answer

What share do you want to mount? Some allow to put credentials into external files only readable by root. This is the preferred way to handle this.

An example: CIFS/SMB knows the option credentials=filename where filename is a file with the following content: 

username=value
password=value
domain=value

See man mount.cifs for more information.

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