I'm having trouble pulling the whole file directory from a rooted android device with ADB. There are special permissions errors. So I thought a solution would be to chmod everything so the ADB daemon effectively runs with root permissions (can't run it with root permissions directly). Then possibly chmod everything back to the way it was after I've pulled all the files with adb pull.
Are there any risks involved with this approach? What about not changing the permissions back to normal? While my case is specific to android I'd be interested to hear any difference for normal linux systems.
Best Answer
By changing everything to 777, you are bypassing most of Linuxes privileges security settings, and this would be considered unsafe, and definitely not best practice.
The problem is that if someone can penetrate your system as a user other than yourself, if your files are CHMOD 777, they can read, write, execute and delete them. This is considered a security threat.
Similarly, having files with "777" permissions means that if someone can find a non-executable file, and overwrite it with a script, and can trick you to run that file, it will execute, which is a security risk.
If it were me, I definitely wouldn't do it, but if you are the only user of your system, and you are not worried about targeted attacks, you might be able to get away with it on an Android device (you are vulnerable, but somewhat insulated by the privileges system and single-user nature of the device) - but doing it on any kind of Linux server is begging for it to be hacked.